Introspecting Human Development

Since the 1990s the two distinct aspects observed in the development discourse are human development on the one hand and inclusive development on the other. This has led to the advent of both the initial Millennium Development Goal (MDG) and current Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets of 2030, which cover a whole lot of domains with their relevant indicators. However, human development as an alternative to money metric assessment of development has not yet been entirely bought out. There is an agreement that human deve­lopment is perhaps a necessary reflection of translating development to welfare, however, this still underlies the importance of means against the ends. Such an argument is made in the context of distribution vis-à-vis development wherein a fair distribution is considered ideal but a better magnitude of “means” is considered a prerequisite. In other words, there has to be an emphasis on making the cake bigger and bigger by any means and automatically the share of the cake in distribution will be larger and larger. This assumption of the obvious implication of means ­towards the ends is hypothetical and it all depends on how and in what manner is the means made or accumulated.

Human development has of course gained a recognition far and wide across all quarters given the combination of means and ends together, however, weighing them equally. Income is a means and education and health components are the ends that demonstrate the extent of translation occurring between the means and ends. While comprehension of human development hardly considers this aspect rather than manifesting a comparative status assessment against an ideal across populations. In this effort, what we get to obtain is the relative state of affairs more than the absolute state of affairs. When we say an absolute state of affairs, we are hinting at the kind of interdependence the domains of human development can have and what is ideal as regard this interdependence because they can never be uniform across various stages and levels in the evolution of transition.