Suppose you had to judge whether a country counts as developed, using just one number. Most people reach for the same one without much thought: how much money people earn.
Development has many aspects, and there is no single ready-made definition of it. When people picture a better country, they are usually picturing several things at once — can life be better for everyone, not just some; can there be more equality; how should people live together with one another. These questions do not reduce to any one thing, however useful that one thing might be.
Lay the aspirations out and they take a rough shape: more income — regular work, better wages, a fair price for what people produce; equal treatment, free from discrimination; the freedom to decide for yourself what you do with your life; security, a stable and safe future to plan around; and simple respect, dignity in the eyes of others. Development, in most people's own account of it, is a mix of these, not income alone.
Income is the most common single measure of development, and a genuinely useful place to start. A full account of development needs other criteria too — the quality of life people actually lead, and environmental sustainability, whether that life can be kept up without wrecking the environment it depends on. Because people's aspirations differ and sometimes pull against each other, weighing them against one another isn't something any single definition can settle — that happens only through a democratic political process.
Different people hold different developmental goals, because their life situations are not the same. Landless rural labourers want more days of work and better wages. They want a local school that can actually teach their children something worth learning, and they want an end to the social discrimination that has kept people like them out of leadership in their own village.
Prosperous farmers in Punjab want an assured high family income — through higher support prices for their crop — and the means to settle their children abroad. A girl from a rich urban family wants the same freedom her brother already has: to decide her own life, including whether to study overseas.
Goals can directly conflict, too. Industrialists chasing more electricity often want a bigger dam built — but a bigger dam can submerge land and disrupt the lives of people displaced by it. Tribal families (adivasis) displaced this way may resent it, preferring smaller check dams or tanks instead.
What may be development for one person or group may not be development for another — it may even be destructive for the other.
Beyond wanting more income, people also seek things a payslip cannot buy: freedom to decide their own life, a measure of security, plain respect from others, and treatment as an equal rather than being singled out for discrimination.
Weigh two jobs against each other. One pays well but could disappear tomorrow, leaves no time for family, and offers no certainty to plan a life around. The other pays less, but the work is steady and the future it offers is stable. A job like the second is often preferred over the first, even at lower pay, because money is only one factor a life depends on — the rest is harder to measure, but counts for just as much.
Just as one person's aspirations are never just one thing, there is no single, ready-made definition of national development either. A nation is made up of individuals whose situations differ, so their goals differ too — citizens can want different, even conflicting, things from their own country's development.
Not every idea can count equally. Two questions decide which ones should: does this idea benefit a large number of people, or only a small group, and what would be a fair and just path for everyone? A democratic political process is how a country actually answers these two questions in practice — never one group simply asserting its own goal as the nation's.
To compare countries or states for some purpose, we first need a criterion: one or more shared characteristics to measure them against. For comparing countries, income is treated as one of the most important such characteristics. The reasoning is straightforward: a country with greater income can let its people obtain more of whatever they need.
Total national income by itself is not a fair basis for comparison, though, because countries do not have the same number of people. A country's total income divided by its total population gives its average income — usually called per capita income — and it is this average that is actually used to compare countries.
The World Bank's World Development Reports sort countries by exactly this number. In 2024, a country with a per capita income of about US\$66,500 a year or more counts as "high income," or rich; a country at about US\$2,300 a year or less counts as "low income." India's own per capita income in 2024 was about US\$11,000 a year, placing it in the "low middle income" category — above the low-income mark, some way short of the high-income one.
Two countries can share an identical average income and still be entirely different places to live. Imagine two countries, each with five citizens, each reporting an average monthly income of Rs 10,000 — the same figure, by the criterion just set out. In Country A, the five incomes are Rs 9,500, Rs 10,500, Rs 9,800, Rs 10,000 and Rs 10,200: a narrow, near-equal spread, in which nobody is very rich and nobody is desperately poor. In Country B, the five incomes are Rs 500, Rs 500, Rs 500, Rs 500 and Rs 48,000: four citizens living in poverty, and one citizen who is extremely rich. Add either list up and divide by five, and both countries report exactly the same per capita income: Rs 10,000.
Now ask which of the two countries you would rather live in — without knowing in advance which of the five citizens you would turn out to be. Most people choose Country A, because its income is spread far more equitably, even though the average income of both countries is identical. The number that made the two countries look the same is exactly the number that hides how different they actually are.
An average is useful for comparison, but it does not tell us how the underlying income is distributed among people — and that gap, between the average and the distribution behind it, is worth remembering every time a single figure like per capita income is used to judge how well off a country's people actually are.
It is tempting, once you have a country's per capita income, to treat that number as the whole answer — as if it told you everything worth knowing about how well off people in that country generally are. If per capita income is high, the reasoning goes, people must be doing fine; if it is low, they must not be.
The two five-citizen countries worked through above show why this fails. Country A and Country B share the identical per capita income of Rs 10,000 a month, yet one has a narrow, near-equal spread of incomes across its five citizens and the other has four citizens in poverty and one who is extremely rich — the average alone cannot tell them apart. Per capita income is only an average; it says nothing, by itself, about how that income is actually shared out among the people it was averaged over.
The same gap, between a headline average and the reality it can hide, applies wherever a single average stands in for a whole population — including when the per capita incomes of states like Kerala and Haryana are compared. It stays a fair way to rank countries; it just cannot show who inside each one is actually doing well.
Income tells you how much money moves through a state's economy, but it does not tell you whether a newborn survives its first year, whether people can read and write, or whether teenagers who should be in school actually are. Because income alone is not enough to judge development, comparisons between states also look at health and education.
For every 1000 children born alive in a given year, the Infant Mortality Rate, or IMR, counts how many die before their first birthday.
Among everyone aged seven and above, the Literacy Rate measures the share who can read and write.
Pick an age group — 15 to 17 years, say, the age for secondary school — and the Net Attendance Ratio asks what percentage of it is actually attending school at that stage.
In 2023-24, Haryana's per capita income was Rs 3,25,759, well above Kerala's Rs 2,81,001. On income alone, Haryana looks like the more prosperous state.
Yet on the indicators that track how people actually live, the ranking reverses. Kerala's Infant Mortality Rate is 6 deaths per 1000 live births, against Haryana's 28, nearly three times higher; its literacy rate stood at 94% in 2017-18, against Haryana's 82%; and its net attendance ratio at the secondary stage reached 94% that same year, against Haryana's 73%.
The state with the lower average income does better on every health and education indicator in this comparison.
Haryana earns more per person than Kerala. It is easy to look at that one number and conclude that Haryana must be the more developed of the two states — more income, so a better life for its people.
Development is multi-dimensional, and income is only one part of it. Kerala, despite its lower per capita income, has a far lower Infant Mortality Rate than Haryana, a higher literacy rate, and a higher share of its teenagers actually attending secondary school. On health and education, Kerala is well ahead.
Income growth on its own does not guarantee any of this. A full wallet cannot shield a person from infectious disease or guarantee a pollution-free environment, unless the community around them has the same protections.
A state with lower income doing better than a richer neighbour on health and education comes down to how those things are provided, not to how much money is available.
A pollution-free environment, protection from infectious disease, safety, a functioning local school — none of these come from private spending alone. They are best, and cheapest, provided collectively rather than bought household by household.
A single household paying for its own security guard covers only that house, at a high cost; a whole locality funding shared security together protects far more people for far less each. A child, in the same way, can only really study if enough other children in the community also want to study and if the government builds and runs schools they can all attend — one family's fees cannot conjure a functioning school into existence on their own.
Kerala's low Infant Mortality Rate and high literacy rate trace back to exactly this kind of collective provision — public health facilities and schools that reach most families, and a well-functioning Public Distribution System that gets food and other essentials to households cheaply, not private spending power.
Income alone cannot tell the whole story of a country's development. The United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report addresses this by combining three separate measures into one number, called the Human Development Index, or HDI.
Money is the first component, counted as Gross National Income per capita — but measured in PPP dollars, so that a dollar buys the same basket of goods and services no matter which country it is spent in. Health comes next, tracked through life expectancy at birth. Rounding out the three is education, measured as the mean years of schooling completed by adults aged 25 and above.
Notice the order the name puts these words in: Human before Development. That ordering is deliberate. It says the point of development is what is happening to a country's citizens — their health and their well-being — not output for its own sake.
I assumed, before looking at the Human Development Report 2025 data, that richer simply meant healthier — that a country with more income would rank higher on the Human Development Index too. Among India's neighbours, the numbers do not cooperate with that assumption.
Sri Lanka fits it. Ranked 89th in the world, well ahead of India's 130th, it also leads India on every underlying number: a Gross National Income per capita of PPP \$12,616 against India's \$9,047, a life expectancy of 77.5 years against 72, and 10.8 mean years of schooling against 6.9.
Nepal and Bangladesh do not fit it. Nepal, ranked 145th, has a per capita income of only PPP \$4,726 — a little over half of India's — yet a life expectancy of 70.4 years, not far short of India's own 72. Bangladesh, tied with India at rank 130th, has a lower income too, PPP \$8,498, but a higher life expectancy: 74.7 years against India's 72.
Income rank and Human Development Index rank, it turns out, do not always move together — not even among close neighbours.
Reaching a given level of development is not the end of the question. A further one follows: can that level be sustained for the generations who come after us? "We have not inherited the world from our forefathers — we have borrowed it from our children."
Since the second half of the twentieth century, scientists have been sounding a warning about this. The present type and level of development, they say, is not sustainable, because it can exhaust the natural resource base that development itself depends on.
Environmental degradation does not stop at a national or a state border. That makes it a shared, not merely local, problem.
Renewable resources are ones nature keeps replenishing — groundwater is one example. But "renewable" does not mean a resource cannot run short: if it is drawn out faster than nature refills it, the reserve falls anyway.
Groundwater in India is doing exactly that across large parts of the country. About 300 districts have reported a groundwater-level decline of more than 4 metres over the past twenty years. Roughly one-third of the country is already overusing its groundwater reserves, and at the present rate of use, that share would grow to about 60 per cent within another 25 years.
The overuse is not spread evenly. It concentrates in a few kinds of places: the agriculturally prosperous belts of Punjab and western Uttar Pradesh, the hard-rock plateau areas of central and south India, some coastal stretches, and settlements where urban growth is fastest.
Crude oil is a non-renewable resource. It exists as a fixed stock, and no amount of extraction replenishes it. Exploration can still add newly discovered stock, but the total remains a stock that use gradually depletes.
How long that stock lasts depends on where you are counting from. At 2017 rates of extraction, the world's known crude oil reserves — 1,732 thousand million barrels — would last about 47 more years. The Middle East would stretch its own reserves to roughly 70 years at the same rate. The United States, by contrast, has only about 10.5 years left on its own reserves.
That unevenness has consequences beyond the oil itself. A country holding thin reserves may seek to secure its oil supply through military or economic power. For a country that imports its oil, such as India, that exposure to price increases is real.
Development is not one thing to be maximised. It is a bundle of goals — income, but also health, education, equal treatment, freedom, and a liveable environment — that different people and communities weigh differently.
It cannot be read off a single average, and it depends heavily on what a society chooses to provide collectively rather than leave to private income.
Whatever level of development is reached has to be sustainable, too — for the generations who inherit whatever is left of the resource base once this generation is done with it.