Criteria for development

CRITERIA FOR DEVELOPMENT

• As we discussed earlier, apart from income, people have other goals such as security and freedom. Let us look at various indicators that can help to measure development:

1. Infant Mortality Rate (IMR): It indicates the number of children that die before the age of one year as a proportion of 1000 live children that are born in that particular year.

2. Literacy Rate: Measures the population of the literate population in the 7 and above age group.

3. Net Attendance ratio: Total number of children of age 14 and 15 years attending school as a percentage of the total number of children in the same age group.

• Thus, a state or country might have a good per capita income but perform poorly in the criteria mentioned above.

 Government and public facilities

• Money in our pocket cannot buy us all the goods and services that we may need to live well.
• Income itself is not a complete adequate indicator of material goods and services a citizen can use. It cannot buy us a pollution-free environment or get us unadulterated food or medicines.

• collectively. More children can go to high schools if the state provides adequate facilities to its people.
• Kerala has a low infant mortality rate because it has an adequate provision of basic health and educational facilities. 
• To check if we are properly nourished, we calculate Body Mass Index or BMI. It is calculated by dividing the weight (in kgs) by the square of height (in meters)

• Human Development Report: After realizing that only per capita income is an inadequate criterion to measure development, we made a small list of other important criteria. Over the past decade, health and education indicators have come to be widely used as a measure of development. The human development report published by UNDP gives an account of development using these measures.

• Here, Life Expectancy at Birth means the average expected length of life of a person at the time of birth.
• HDI stands for Human Development Index.  
• Per capita income is calculated in dollars for every country to ease comparison between them.