NCERT Solutions for Class 12 Geography Chapter 3 Human Development

The Human Development Index (HDI) is a summary measure of average achievement in key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, being knowledgeable and have a decent standard of living. The HDI is the geometric mean of normalized indices for each of the three dimensions. Human development – or the human development approach – is about expanding the richness of human life, rather than simply the richness of the economy in which human beings live.

It is an approach that is focused on people and their opportunities and choices. The health dimension is assessed by life expectancy at birth, the education dimension is measured by mean of years of schooling for adults aged 25 years and more and expected years of schooling for children of school entering age. The standard of living dimension is measured by gross national income per capita.

The reasons for low levels of Human Development in most of the northern states of India are:

• These states are less developed as most the states are dependent on agriculture.
• These states are plagued with problems like poverty, unemployment and illiteracy.

Give two reasons for declining child sex ratio in India?
Two reasons for declining child sex ration in India are:

1. In India there is still preference for male child and in some areas of the country the female infanticide is still common.
2. Majority of the places in India follow the patriarchal system. In India, males are considered to be the only bread earners. The methods of sex determination and female foeticide are adopted which is main reason of declining number of females especially in North India.

India has been placed among the countries with medium human development index. It has human development index of 134. Kerala with the composite index value of 0.638 is placed at the top rank followed by Punjab (0.537), Tamil Nadu (0.531) Maharashtra (0.523) and Haryana (0.509). States like Bihar (0.367), Assam (0.386), Uttar Pradesh (0.388), Madhya Pradesh (0.394) and Odisha (0.404) are at the bottom among the 15 major states in India.

There are several socio-political, economic and historical reasons for such a state of affairs. Kerala is able to record the highest value in the HDI largely due to its impressive performance in achieving near hundred per cent literacy (90.92 per cent) in 2001. States like Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Assam and Uttar Pradesh have very low literacy. States showing higher total literacy rates have less gaps between the male and female literacy rates.
Apart from the educational attainment, the levels of economic development too play significant impacts on HDI. Economically developed states like Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Punjab and Haryana have higher value of HDI as compared to states like Assam, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, etc.

Regional distortions and social disparities continue to play an important role in the Indian economy, polity and society. It is found that states with wider variations in social group like Uttar Pradesh tend to have lower Human development index due to communal tensions, differential resource distribution to people of different social groups.