Development

This is Chapter 1 of the Class 10 book Understanding Economic Development: 15 pages (3–17), with a page of notes for teachers (p. 2). It has no numbered sections but eight headed parts — what development promises; income and other goals; national development; how to compare countries or states; income and other criteria; public facilities; the Human Development Report; sustainability — with seven tables (1.1–1.7), three activities, four ‘Let's work these out’ boxes, two boxed examples, several cartoons and photographs, and 13 exercise questions. The book is simple on purpose; we keep the depth by explaining every measure from first principles, recomputing every derived number, giving each table's year, and flagging stale or inconsistent figures.

• Leads into the rest of the book: jess202 (sectors and jobs), jess203 (money and credit, SHGs), jess204 (globalisation), jess205 (consumer rights).
• Pairs with Indian Economic Development (keec1): keec101 (the colonial baseline), keec104 (human capital — health and education), keec106 (employment), keec107 (environment and sustainable development); and Introductory Macroeconomics (leec1): leec102 (national income and per capita income, real vs nominal).
• Geography, polity, world politics: Fundamentals of Human Geography legy103 (Human Development — HDI and its approaches); India: People and Economy legy201 (Population) and legy206 (Planning and Sustainable Development in Indian Context); keec108 (India and its neighbours compared — Table 1.6's theme); Political Theory keps104 (Social Justice — fair distribution); Contemporary World Politics leps106 (Environment and Natural Resources).
• UPSC, honestly: these are recurring Prelims and GS3 themes — what the HDI measures (1997), South Asian HDI rankings (2003), per capita income and population (1979, 1996), purchasing power parity (2019) — and GS2/GS3 essays on why high growth hasn't delivered human development (2019), hunger beyond food availability (2018), HDI vs inequality-adjusted HDI (2025) and inter-generational equity (2020). We link nine.

• Different people, different — even conflicting — goals: what is development for one (a big dam for electricity) may be destructive for another (people displaced).
• People want income and also non-material goals: equal treatment, freedom, security, respect. What cannot be measured is not unimportant.
• Per capita income = total income ÷ population; the World Bank classifies countries by it. Averages hide distribution (Table 1.2: ₹10,000 average in both A and B).
• Income is not enough: Haryana's income per head is 1.16 × Kerala's, but its IMR is 28 vs 6. Money can't buy what has to be provided collectively — schools, health care, PDS.
• HDI (UNDP, Human Development Report) = health + education + income. HDR 2025: India 130, Sri Lanka 89, Bangladesh 130, Nepal 145, Myanmar 150, Pakistan 168 (of 193).
• Sustainability: renewable resources (groundwater) can be overused; non-renewable ones (crude oil, about 47 years left) get exhausted. ‘We have borrowed the world from our children.’

Table 1.1 lists what development might mean to different people. A landless rural labourer wants more days of work and better wages, a good local school, no social discrimination and a chance to lead in the village. Prosperous farmers from Punjab want high family income through higher support prices and cheap, hard-working labourers, and to settle their children abroad. A girl from a rich urban family wants as much freedom as her brother and to study abroad. Other rows — rain-dependent farmers, a rural woman from a land-owning family, unemployed urban youth, a rich urban boy, an adivasi from the Narmada valley — are left for you to fill. Two things follow: (1) different persons have different developmental goals, because their life situations differ; (2) what is development for one may not be development for another — it may even be destructive. A sister wants her brother to share housework; he may not like it. Industrialists want more dams for electricity; people whose land would be submerged, such as tribal communities, may prefer small check dams or tanks.

Notice the conflict in Table 1.1 itself: the Punjab farmers' wish for ‘cheap labourers’ is the opposite of the landless labourers' wish for ‘better wages’. Development is not a single ladder everyone climbs together.

Look again at Table 1.1: almost everyone wants regular work, better wages, a decent price for what they produce — in short, more income. But people also seek equal treatment, freedom, security and respect, and resent discrimination. These non-material goals can matter as much as, or more than, income or consumption. Friendship is NCERT's example: hard to measure, but it means a lot. What cannot be measured is not unimportant. When choosing a job you weigh facilities for your family, the working atmosphere, the chance to learn, job security and time for your family, not only pay. The same holds for society: if women do paid work, their dignity in the household rises; and if women are respected, housework is shared more and women working outside is accepted more readily; a safe environment lets more women take up jobs or run businesses.

National development: since individuals seek different goals, their ideas of national development differ too. NCERT asks you to judge ideas by fairness and justice, by whether there is a better way of doing things, and by whether they benefit a large number of people or only a small group.

To compare students you pick characteristics that suit the purpose — a sports team, a debate team. For countries, income is taken as one of the most important attributes, on the idea that more income means more of all the things people need. But total income is not a fair comparison, because populations differ. So we use average income, also called per capita income = total income ÷ population. The World Bank's World Development Reports classify countries by it into high-income, middle-income and low-income; rich countries, excluding the Middle East and some small countries, are generally called developed; India is a lower-middle-income country.

Averages hide disparities. Table 1.2 gives two five-citizen countries. Country A's monthly incomes are ₹9,500, 10,500, 9,800, 10,000 and 10,200; country B's ₹500, 500, 500, 500 and 48,000. Both add up to ₹50,000, so both averages are ₹10,000 (we checked). If a lottery decided which citizen you would be, most would choose A, where income is equitably distributed; in B most people are poor and one is very rich. So the average is useful for comparison but tells us nothing about distribution. Likewise a rising average over time does not prove that every group is better off.

Table 1.3 gives per capita income (strictly, per capita Net State Domestic Product at current prices) for 2023–24: Haryana ₹3,25,759, Kerala ₹2,81,001, Bihar ₹60,337 (Economic Survey 2024–25). By income alone, Haryana is the most developed of the three — 1.16 times Kerala and 5.4 times Bihar — and Bihar the least. Table 1.4 adds three indicators: infant mortality rate (2020): Haryana 28, Kerala 6, Bihar 27; literacy rate (2017–18): 82, 94, 62; net attendance ratio, secondary stage, ages 15–17 (2017–18): 73, 94, 69. Kerala, with lower income than Haryana, has an infant mortality rate less than a quarter of Haryana's; and in Bihar 100 − 69 = 31% — about one-third — of 15–17-year-olds are not in secondary school.

Why? Money in your pocket cannot buy everything you need to live well — a pollution-free environment, unadulterated medicines, protection from infectious disease unless the whole community takes precautions. For many important things the best and cheapest way is collective provision: one security arrangement for a locality is cheaper than a guard for every house; you can study because many children want to and the government opens schools. Kerala's low IMR comes from adequate basic health and education facilities; where the Public Distribution System (PDS) works well, health and nutrition are likely to be better. In one study, 90% of rural people in Tamil Nadu used a ration shop against 35% in West Bengal — people in Tamil Nadu are likely to be better off on this count.

Activity 2 uses Table 1.5 (rural Uttar Pradesh): literacy of the rural population 76% (male) and 54% (female); literacy among rural children aged 10–14, 90% and 87%; children aged 10–14 attending school, 85% and 82%. Filled in: (a) literacy is 76% for rural males and 54% for rural females, and there are children — 15% of boys and 18% of girls aged 10–14 — who are currently not in school; (b) 18% of rural girls and 15% of rural boys are not attending school, and illiteracy among children aged 10–14 is 13% for girls and 10% for boys; (c) this high illiteracy in the 10–14 age group, more than 75 years after independence, falls short of the constitutional goal of free and compulsory education up to age 14, expected by 1960.

Income is important but inadequate; a long list of criteria would be unwieldy; so we need a small number of the most important things. Health and education indicators are now widely used with income. The Human Development Report, published by the UNDP, compares countries by people's educational levels, health status and per capita income. Table 1.6 (from HDR 2025, data for 2023) compares India with its neighbours on gross national income per capita (in 2021 PPP dollars), life expectancy at birth, mean years of schooling (people aged 25+) and HDI rank out of 193 countries. Income is converted at purchasing power parity, so that a dollar buys the same amount of goods and services in every country.

Sri Lanka, a small neighbour, is ahead of India on every column — 1.39 times India's income, 5.5 more years of life, 3.9 more years of schooling, rank 89 against 130. Bangladesh has about 6% less income per head than India (8,498 vs 9,047) yet lives 2.7 years longer (74.7 vs 72) and now shares India's rank of 130. Top and bottom on each column (Exercise 12): income — Sri Lanka top, Nepal bottom; life expectancy — Sri Lanka top, Myanmar bottom; schooling — Sri Lanka top, Pakistan bottom; HDI rank — Sri Lanka best, Pakistan worst. By putting ‘Human’ before ‘Development’, the report makes clear that what matters is what happens to people — their health and well-being.

Activity 3 — Body Mass Index: weigh yourself in kilograms, measure your height in metres, and divide weight by the square of height. Example (ours †): 45 kg and 1.55 m give 45 ÷ (1.55 × 1.55) = 45 ÷ 2.4025 = 18.7. Compare it with the BMI-for-age tables (pages 90–91 of the book): NCERT's examples — a girl aged 14 years 8 months with BMI 15.2 is undernourished; a boy aged 15 years 6 months with BMI 28 is overweight. NCERT asks students to discuss food and exercise habits without body-shaming anyone.

Even a well-developed country wants its development to last for future generations. Since the second half of the twentieth century, scientists have warned that the present type and level of development are not sustainable. Example 1 — groundwater: about 300 districts reported a fall in the water level of over 4 metres in 20 years; nearly one-third of the country is overusing groundwater; within 25 years 60% may be doing so if present use continues; overuse is worst in agriculturally prosperous Punjab and western UP, the hard-rock plateaus of central and south India, some coastal areas and fast-growing cities. Groundwater is a renewable resource — replenished by nature, like crops and plants — but it is overused when we take out more than rain puts back.

Example 2 — crude oil, a non-renewable resource: a fixed stock that cannot be replenished, though new discoveries add to known reserves for a while. Table 1.7 (Energy Institute, Statistical Review of World Energy 2024): reserves of 836 thousand million barrels in the Middle East (70 years at current extraction), 69 in the USA (10.5 years) and 1,732 for the world (47 years). Dividing reserves by years gives the yearly extraction those figures assume: about 11.9 (Middle East), 6.6 (USA) and 36.9 (world) thousand million barrels a year — roughly 101 million barrels a day worldwide. The Middle East holds 836 ÷ 1,732 = 48% of world reserves. Countries like India that import much of their oil are hurt when prices rise; NCERT notes that countries with low reserves, such as the USA, seek oil through military or economic power. Environmental damage does not respect national boundaries — ‘our future is linked together’.

The chapter has four ‘Let's work these out’ boxes, three activities and questions under the two examples. Outlines below; numbers recomputed.

Thirteen questions: three multiple-choice, nine short or long answers, one data question. Try first, then open.

Numbers

One-liners

• Different life situations, different development goals — sometimes conflicting.
• What cannot be measured is not unimportant.
• Per capita income = total income ÷ population.
• Averages are useful but hide how income is shared.
• Money can't buy what must be provided collectively.
• Kerala: lower income than Haryana, far lower infant mortality.
• HDI = health + education + income.
• Sri Lanka leads South Asia on every column of Table 1.6.
• Renewable resources can be overused; non-renewable ones get used up.
• We have borrowed the world from our children.

Traps to avoid

• Haryana's IMR is 4.7 times Kerala's, not ‘nearly three times’ as the text says.
• Nepal's life expectancy (70.4) is below India's (72); only Bangladesh beats India with lower income.
• NCERT's World Bank cut-offs ($66,500, $2,300, India $11,000) don't match the World Bank's Atlas-method thresholds.
• The World Bank classes India as lower-middle income.
• Table 1.6's rank column says 2021–22 but the ranks are HDR 2025's (2023 data).
• Table 1.7 says ‘2017’ reserves from a 2024 source; and 47 years, not 50.
• Table 1.5 has no year or source.
• HDI uses PPP income, not exchange-rate income.
• HDI's education index also uses expected years of schooling.
• Per capita income is divided by total population, not by the workforce.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• HDI components: health, education and income at PPP (1997); South Asian HDI order (2003: Maldives–Sri Lanka–India–Pakistan); PPP compares the price of the same basket (2019).
• Per capita income = total ÷ population: a falling population raises it, other things equal (1979); national income vs per capita income (1996, assertion–reason — the official key says both true with R explaining A; we think A is debatable, since per capita income has risen severalfold since 1947).
• Also expect: IMR, literacy and NAR definitions; IHDI, GII, MPI; World Bank income groups; renewable vs non-renewable resources; SDGs and Brundtland.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• GS2/GS3: high growth but low human development (2019); hunger beyond food availability (2018); HDI vs IHDI (2025); intra- and inter-generational equity (2020). Use Table 1.2 for distribution, Kerala vs Haryana for public provision, Bangladesh vs India for health outcomes, Brundtland for sustainability.
• Set positions side by side — growth first (Bhagwati–Panagariya) vs public action (Drèze–Sen); dams for water and power vs displacement (NBA; the Supreme Court's 2000 judgment) — and quote dated data with its year. No present-day political commentary.

Tap an option. NCERT's own exercise questions come first; the rest test the figures and common confusions.

Open any question to attempt it in the Question bank — your attempt is saved to your progress.