Patna, May 20: Bihar, for the first time, has decided to come out with a human development index (HDI) report for the state. The report is likely to be released in June this year.

Apart from giving an overall picture of the state on four parameters — per capita income, life expectancy at birth, literacy rate and gross enrolment ratio in schools, the report would also have these details for all 38 districts of the state.

The survey and data collection work for generating this report was started around a year ago by a joint team of the state government and AN Sinha Institute. The report, which contains about 400 pages of data, is being given final touches before its formal release.

“This report would give an insight into the quality of life of the people of the state. It would, in turn, help the government in planning as the basic goal of all the schemes is to improve the quality of life of people of the state,” planning and development department principal secretary Vijoy Prakash said.

Citing an example, he said: “If the report shows that life expectancy at birth is very low, the government can come out with specific plans which would address this issue.”

He said as the report would have district-level data, planners would be better placed at the time of allocating funds to districts and to address the HDI of a laggard district, special attention could be paid at the time of planning itself.

The state government intends to go at a more micro-level while finding out the details on the aforesaid parameters. “After releasing the first report, our team would come out with another report that would have HDI-related data of all the blocks,” said the principal secretary. There are 534 blocks in Bihar.

The concept of HDI, as a parameter is to measure the well being of people of the country, was first brought into play in 1990 by United Nations Development Programme. The index was used to distinguish whether a country was developed, developing or under-developed and also to measure the impact of economic policies on the quality of life of people concerned.

Later on, HDI reports of a more local nature were also published in many parts of the world. The concept was the brainchild of Mahbub ul Haq, a Pakistani economist, who stood for shifting the focus of development economics from national income level to people-centric policies.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen had initially opposed the idea on the pretext that it was difficult to capture complexities of human capabilities in a single index, but after Haq’s persuasion, he went on to help him in providing underlying conceptual framework of HDI.