As the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 2013 report criticised the India for not having ‘inclusive’ growth, the government made a soft dismissal of it and called for a revision of parameters in judging human development.

The deputy chairperson of the planning commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, who released the UNDP report titled “The rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World”, said that the human development index (HDI) needs to be measured by more indicators than it has right now. The human development report (HDR) is judged by three indicators: education, health and income dimensions. Ahluwalia said it has gone into more indicators in the 12th five-year plan to judge human development index (HDI) to stay away from the criticism of just ‘growth oriented government’.

“The development objectives have to be more multidimensional than captured in the HDI alone,” said Ahluwalia. However, he added that the idea is not to be a critique of the UNDP report. The late Pakistani economist Mehboob-ul Haque had been credited for developing HDI in 1989, and a year after the first HDI report came into existence.

“For the 12th five-year plan, we have a multidimensional idea to judge things. There are 25 monitorable indicators. However, one of them is GDP growth. But we have also target growth rate for agriculture,” said Ahluwalia. In the 25 indicators, some of them he mentioned are: progress in education, maternal mortality rate (MMR) and infant mortality rate (IMR), green forest cover, number of jobs created in the organised sector etc.

According to Ahluwalia, the new measure in the 12th five year plan is to make judgments are multidimensional perspective.

“And if 80 percent of the target is achieved, then we can say that we have done good job,” he added. He cited example of Bhutan and said that the country has gone into a much more conceptual concept of gross national happiness.

A report on the “green national accounts for India” was submitted this week by Prof Partha Dasgupta, eminent environmentalist. It delves into conceptual foundations of economic evaluation, providing an outline of what would ideally be needed for a comprehensive set of national accounts.

However, the UNDP report said that India's performance is not inclusive what government has been repeating over the years. Of 187 countries measured in the report, India's HDI rank stands at 136, on a par with Africa's Equatorial Guinea and just above Cambodia and Laos in Southeast Asia.

In the BRICS grouping (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), India's standing is much below its peers - China is ranked 101st, Russia 55th and Brazil 85th. India comes at the bottom end of the second-lowest category in the report - Medium Human Development - even as neighbour Sri Lanka (99) moves a step higher towards becoming a "high human development" nation.