According to the UNDP Human Development Index (HDI) Report 2025, life expectancy in India increased from 58.6 years in 1990 to how many years in 2023?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, 72 years. The UNDP Human Development Report 2025, titled 'A matter of choice: People and possibilities in the age of AI', puts India's life expectancy at birth at exactly 72.0 years for the reference year 2023. The figure sits in Table 1 of the report's statistical annex, the table headed 'Human Development Index and its components', in the row numbered 130 under the Medium human development band. Against 58.6 years in 1990 that is a gain of 13.4 years in a single generation, and the highest value India has recorded since the series began. The same row fixes the rest of India's profile in one line: HDI value 0.685, rank 130 out of 193 countries and territories, expected years of schooling 13.0, mean years of schooling 6.9, and gross national income per capita of 9,047 international dollars at 2021 purchasing power parity. India's HDI trajectory in the report's own time series runs 0.446 in 1990, 0.501 in 2000, 0.590 in 2010, 0.633 in 2015, 0.652 in 2020, then a COVID dip to 0.647 in 2021, and back up through 0.676 in 2022 to 0.685 in 2023. Why the number matters rather than being trivia: life expectancy at birth is one of the HDI's three constituent dimensions — it is the entire measure of 'a long and healthy life' — so India's longevity gain is doing much of the work in that 0.446-to-0.685 climb. Note also what the report defines it as: the years a newborn could expect to live if the age-specific mortality rates prevailing at birth held for its whole life. It is a snapshot of present mortality, not a forecast of any individual's lifespan.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) This is the world's figure, not India's. The same Table 1 gives a World aggregate of 73.4 years alongside a world HDI of 0.756. A candidate who half-remembers that India is 'roughly at the global average' rounds to 73 and drops a third of a mark. India is in fact 1.4 years below the world average, and only 0.1 year above the South Asia regional aggregate of 71.9 years.  (c) Closest to Bangladesh, which is the instructive trap in this table. Bangladesh shares India's exact HDI rank of 130 and its exact HDI value of 0.685, yet reaches 74.7 years of life expectancy — 2.7 years more than India, offset by weaker income (GNI per capita 8,498 against India's 9,047). A second route to a wrong 74 is India's female life expectancy, 73.6 years against 70.5 for males in the report's Gender Development Index table.  (d) BPSC's signature fifth option, and here it is logically impossible rather than merely unsupported. Life expectancy at birth for one country in one report-year is a single scalar quantity: India cannot be 72, 73 and 74 simultaneously in HDR 2025. This option only ever becomes live when the three named choices are separate qualifying items — people, schemes, states, languages — any number of which can be true at once, not competing values of the same measurement.

Concept: The Human Development Index is the UNDP's answer to the claim that national income alone measures development. Conceived by the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq with Amartya Sen and first published in the Human Development Report of 1990, it insists that people, not GDP, are the real wealth of nations. It combines three dimensions through four indicators: a long and healthy life, measured solely by life expectancy at birth; knowledge, measured by expected years of schooling for a child entering school and mean years of schooling for adults aged 25 and above; and a decent standard of living, measured by gross national income per capita at purchasing power parity. Each indicator is rescaled to a 0-1 dimension index against fixed goalposts, and since the 2010 report the three dimension indices are combined as a geometric rather than arithmetic mean — a deliberate change that stops a very high income from compensating for a very short life. Countries are then sorted into four bands: very high (0.800 and above), high, medium and low human development. The annex carries companion measures too — the Inequality-adjusted HDI, which discounts each dimension for how unequally it is distributed, the Gender Development Index, the Gender Inequality Index and the Planetary pressures-adjusted HDI.

State PCS 2025 Q26 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q26 — Economy PYQ with Answer