Measuring Human Development at Sub-National Level: Methods and Application

Ever since it came into existence in 1990, the UNDP Human Development Report and the HDI has become an important tool for measuring progress of a country beyond the narrow boundary of macroeconomic growth. This exercise has been replicated at country level, bringing out national and sub-national HDRs. In India, national HDR has been followed by state level and district level HDRs, bringing to fore some limitations of the current method. First, there is an acute lack of data support at necessary granular level. Second, often the global template is not sufficient to reflect the actual context and diversity of the region for which the report is being prepared and one has to adjust, innovate and modify. However, these exercises across the country have mostly been done in silos and there is no common template for preparing sub-national HDRs. As a result these reports are not comparable either across space or across time. In this paper we draw from the latest UNDP SDG framework and recent methodological advances in preparation of composite indices to propose a template that can be used for preparing SHDRs. The methodology is discussed and then sub-national field data is used to explain its application. The methodology suggested has the added advantage that being based on the SDG framework it can be used as a baseline to monitor progress against the SDGs themselves at state/district/sub-district level. It is expected that the framework will emerge as a platform for preparing HDRs across the country in coming years.