Comment on "Economic reforms and human development indicators in India"

Raghav Jha (2008) has written a fine, dense, although slightly depressing paper on human conditions in India, one that comprehensively mixes analytics, empirics, and policy issues.

The basic message in the paper is that the human development indicators are improving. In the 30 years to 2000–2005, over a decade has been added to life expectancy at birth, and infant mortality rates have more than halved. But progress is slow and uneven, and generally lagging behind the country's stellar economic performance over the past 15 years. Although hardly fitting the futuristic stereotype attributed to Amartya Sen, that the country may be heading towards a scenario of one part “Californian” and the other part “African”, Professor Jha worries that there is little pronounced acceleration in the rate of improvement in human development indicators in response to the faster growth from the 1990s onwards. Moreover, pronounced gender differences remain; especially striking is that female literacy is still only two-thirds that of males...