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Human Development NCERT Chapter Notes CBSE Class 12 Humanitas

CBSE Class 12  NCERT Chapter Notes for Human Development Humanitas
16 April 2025 by
Akash Kumar

Human Development NCERT Chapter Notes CBSE Class 12 Humanitas

CBSE Class 12  NCERT Chapter Notes for Human Development
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Human development focuses on improving people's quality of life by enhancing health, education, and access to resources. It emphasizes equity, sustainability, productivity, and empowerment, ensuring individuals have the freedom and opportunities to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives.

Definition 

“Development is all about enlarging people’s choices in order to lead long, healthy lives with dignity.” – Mahboob Ul Haq. It includes 

  • Development enlarges people’s choice which keep changing also 
  • To create conditions where people can live meaningful lives. 
  • People must be healthy. 
  • Participate in the society and be free to achieve their goals.  

Difference between growth and development

The difference between growth and development:

  1. Both the Growth and Development, Refers to changes over a period of time.
  2. Growth is quantitative, whereas development is qualitative.
  3. Growth is value neutral, whereas development is value positive. 
  4. Growth may be positive or negative, whereas development will always be positive.

Goals:

A meaningful life is not just a long life; it also includes –    

  1. Healthy life.    
  2. Purposeful life    
  3. Free to achieve their goal   
  4. Able to develop their talent.

FOUR PILLARS OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

  • Just as any building is supported by pillars, the idea of human development is supported by the concepts of equity, sustainability, productivity and empowerment. 
  • Equity refers to making equal access to opportunities available to everybody. The opportunities available to people must be equal irrespective of their gender, race, income and in the Indian case, caste. In India, a large number of women and persons belonging to socially and economically backward groups dropout of school. This shows how the choices of these groups get limited by not having access to knowledge.
  • Sustainability means continuity in the availability of opportunities. To have sustainable human development, each generation must have the same opportunities. If a community does not stress the importance of sending its girl children to school, many opportunities will be lost to these young women when they grow up.
  • Productivity here means human labour productivity or productivity in terms of human work. Such productivity must be constantly enriched by building capabilities in people.
  • Empowerment means to have the power to make choices. Such power comes from increasing freedom and capability. Good governance and people-oriented policies are required to empower people. The empowerment of socially and economically disadvantaged groups is of special importance.

Measuring Human Development Index

The human development index (HDI) ranks the countries based on their performance in the key areas of health, education, and access to resource.

  • These rankings are based on a score between 0 to 1. 
  • A higher life expectancy means people have a greater chance of living longer and healthier lives. So, 5 indicator chosen to assess health is life expectancy.
  • For assessing education, Literacy rate and gross enrolment ratio represent access to knowledge. So, indicator chosen to assess education is literacy rate.
  • Access to resource is measured in terms of purchasing power in (US dollars).
  • Each of these dimensions is given a weightage of 1/3. HDI is sum total of weights assigned to all the dimensions. 

Therefore, score of 0.983 is considered very high and 0.268 means very low level of human development. Ultimately rank is decided according to score.

Four approaches to study Human Development

Income Approach:

  1. It is the oldest approach. 
  2. Human development is seen linking to income.
  3. Level of income reflects level of freedom that people enjoy.
  4. Higher level of income means higher level of human development. 

Welfare approach :

  1. Human beings are supposed to be the beneficiaries or targets of all kinds of developmental activities. 
  2. It argues for higher level of government expenditure on health, education and other facilities.
  3. People are not the participants in development but only the passive recipients.
  4. Government is completely responsible for the level of human development. 
  5. It is government’s responsibility to maximise expenditure on people’s welfare. 

Basic needs approach :  

  1. This approach was proposed by I.L.O. (International Labour Organization) 
  2. Six basic needs like health, education, food, water, sanitation and housing were identified. 
  3. This approach ignores the question of human choices. 
  4. The emphasis is laid only on providing the basic needs of defined sections. 

Capability approach: 

  1. This approach was introduced by Prof. Amartya Sen.
  2. It refers to building human capabilities in the area of health and education. 
  3. It also talks about human capabilities to access the resources.

International Comparison Of Human Development
Comparison Of Human Development

Explore Other resources from Humanitas: 


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