Human Development; Convergence Across Indian States

The objective of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives."The Human Development Index (HDI) is a composite index that measures the average achievements in a country in three basic dimensions of human development healthy life, knowledge and a decent standard of living. This paper analyze the issue of convergence of human development among major Indian States as there is high degree of inequality in human development across Indian States. By using convergence analysis, we attempt to find the answer that whether low HDI states will be able to catch up the high HDI states.HDI data from 1991 to 2011 of fifteen major states has been examined. It is important to know whether the distribution of income and output across states is increasingly becoming equal over time, resulting in equality in Human development or the low human development index (HDI) states will remain lower for many generations and those states are having high HDI will be higher for ever. However, for HDI, convergence analysis one has to consider the states as the relevant units of analysis. Our result of convergence analysis shows that HDI states are actually growing at a faster rate than high HDI states leading to convergence in terms of HDI.