The first Human Development Report (HDR) was presented to the world community by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in 1990. Since then, over a 100 countries have prepared the same including Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal. The HDR defines human development as the process of enlarging people ”s choices by enabling people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives.

A large number of scholars and policy–makers have questioned the traditional measures of development like gross domestic product and per capita income as the real indicators of development and stressed on much broader and more representative indicators of development. This search for a few method of measuring development led to the concept of human development and indicators like the HDI. In other words, this concept of human development provides an alternative to the view that equates development with economic growth. Human development focuses on people and it sees economic growth and higher consumption not as ends in themselves but as means to achieve human development.

Unlike the global Human Development Report, the Nepal document produced by the South Asia gives very revealing disaggregated data at the district, development region and ecological zone levels as well as according to various ethnic groups and castes. The report has computed all the major indices including HDI, GDI, Gender Empowerment Measures (GEM), Capability Poverty Measures (CPM) and Human Poverty Index (HPI). Some of these features do not figure even in highly disaggregated state level reports like that of Madhya Pradesh (1998) and Karnataka (1999) in India. This is where the Nepal Report becomes unique in many respects in South Asia.

In the process, the regional disparity within Nepal comes out very clearly. It found that ”people in the hills and Tarai enjoy a higher level of human development than those in the mountains; the HDI value of the mountains is much lower than the national average. Interestingly, unlike other economic indicators, it is not the central development region (mainly Kathmandu and around) but the western development region which has the highest HDI value followed by the eastern and the central development regions. Expectedly, the mid-western and far western regions lag tremendously behind.

The report is unique for its candid analysis of many key sectors and also for the far-reaching recommendations it has made for the significant transformation in these critical areas, though in some cases it looks overstretched and repetitive. A comprehensive database towards the end of this volume would have enhanced its academic value. This could have been used by many outsiders who do not have access to many of the sources that the authors have quoted.

This document is written in a simple and lucid style. People from different walks of life can enjoy it. In fact, it might be a basic document for the politicians in Nepal, for many of whom development still is a notional term and hence is given low priority. NESAC published the report both in English and Nepali. see more