What’s India’s social progress score?

The Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister has recently released the Social Progress Index, ranking the 36 states and Union Territories, and 707 districts of India. This comprehensive report has been prepared by the Institute for Competitiveness in collaboration with Social Progress Imperative, a US-based non-profit that uses data to influence policies. The report maps India’s state and district-wise performances across various social progress indicators like access to education, water and sanitation, healthcare, personal safety, gender equality, personal freedom and choice, ensuring shelter, and a quality environment for everybody. Also listen: UK’s Christmas: Strikes, immigrant-boats worry, Harry & Meghan documentary falloutAt present, India ranks 110th in terms of social progress globally. Within the country, Puducherry has scored the highest across parameters, followed by Lakshadweep and Goa, while Jharkhand and Bihar are right at the bottom. We do have miles to go, but are we on the right track? Where is the country lagging behind? How will a report like this ensure collective well-being and prosperity for India? To answer all these questions and more, we have with us economist Michael Green, the CEO of Social Progress Imperative. Michael has served as a senior official in the UK government’s department for international development and has some expert advice for us. How to quantify social progress and where does India stand? Michael says the Social Progress Index was created about 10 years ago to complement economic measures like the gross domestic product. It was a bid to offer a measure of the real quality of life of people in terms of tangible things, in terms of life expectancy, literacy. Do people have rights? Do people have access to water? That’s what Social Progress Index does. It’s a comprehensive measure of the real lived experience of people in the country. And that allows for comparisons around the world.The Social Progress Imperative has ranked 169 countries across the world on the social progress index with data that runs from 2011 to 2022. At the very top tier are the Scandinavian countries. Norway is the highest performing country in the world. At the bottom in tier six are essentially the failed states and countries in conflict.India comes in the fourth tier of progress and ranks 110th in the world. Its score is a 60, whereas the world average is 65. But what’s really striking about India’s performance on the Social Progress Index is that its score has improved by about eight points in the last 10 years, which is quite a lot. India has caught up fairly fast with emerging markets like Turkey or Brazil or Mexico over that period. How many ‘quality of life’ boxes does India tick? Michael breaks the social progress model into three big buckets. The first one is basic human needs like food, water, shelter and safety. India is batting average in each of those areas. The second one is about the foundations of well-being --- access to education, access to information, health and environmental quality. India is probably a bit ahead of the game for its level of economic development on access to information. But it is lagging behind with environmental quality owing to a range of factors like exposure to lead and outdoor air pollution among others. The third bucket is that of opportunity, things like rights, freedom and choice, inclusiveness and access to advanced education. India is doing particularly well in access to advanced education. The quality of the universities in India is making its strength relative to its level of economic development. Simply put, it’s much harder to build an inclusive society in India, which seems to have among the world’s largest populations, compared to, say, Iceland, that has 300,000 people. India is facing bigger challenges because it’s a bigger country.How have the individual states and districts fared? For a country the size of India, there will be a huge amount of variation at the stage and district level. The social progress index for India’s states and districts, delivered by the Institute of Competitiveness to NITI Aayog has been a fascinating project, says Michael, adding that some states and districts are much further ahead of some of their peers. According to the broad findings, smaller states are doing better. Puducherry is the highest ranked state, and so many of the other well ranked states are smaller states. It’s harder for some of the bigger states to catch up. Despite India’s cultural diversities, what the social progress index does is create a standard benchmark that can be applied in any context. And the values behind the index are those embedded within the UN sustainable development goals.Michael feels the sustainable development goals represent a kind of global consensus of the kind of societies we are trying to build. So, the social progress index framework is based in those SDGs. So, if one looks at the different parts of a country like India, the diversity there, one is essentially trying to ask the same questions about them. There will be different answers, based on different cultures for different regions. How will a social progress index ensure collective well-being and prosperity?The social progress index will create a balance, not focus only on economic growth, but make sure that people are part of the equation, stresses Michael. And over the last 10 years, it’s been used extensively around the world as a way of helping not just governments, but also businesses and NGOs to set better strategies that are more human centered. For India, what this data offers is a way of understanding and diagnosing where the biggest challenges are, to then help focus resources on finding solutions. Michaels feels this report will set benchmarks, help the country learn from them and also tell success stories. India can use the social progress index data as a way of tracking performance over time, to monitor whether certain programmes and policies are actually improving people’s lives. Audio production: Prateek Kapoor