MAKING A MEASURE

The history of the Human Development project

- DAVID C ENGERMAN

David C Engerman’s Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made traces the history of six individuals—Jagdish Bhagwati, Mahbub ul Haq, Lal Jayawardena, Amartya Sen, Manmohan Singh and Rehman Sobhan—who, through their work and scholarship, shaped development thought in the twentieth century. This excerpt from the book, published by Penguin Random House, India, focusses on the figures and institutions who participated in the Human Development project and “the grandiose goal of formulating a measurement of ‘the human condition.” It recounts various questions and critiques that cropped up around it, explaining how differences in approach became “glaringly apparent in the debate over creating the Human Development Index.”

THE MOST CONSISTENT and energetic programme to devise a new development metric took place at the North-South Roundtable led by the Haqs. After Mahbub left the World Bank in 1982 and occupied a succession of posts in Pakistan’s cabinet, Khadija, the North-South Roundtable’s executive director, convened a series of meetings that redefined the term Human Development. Up until the mid 1980s, Human Development often carried with it a connotation of human resource development, which focussed on policies to create a better-educated and healthier work force—a form of what had earlier been called “manpower planning.” While this vision drew attention to health and especially education, it did so with the assumption that workers were primarily economic resources—the means, not the ends, of development.