In order to achieve growth rate of around 10%, Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant has said that India needs to improve its human development index (HDI). In the 2016 UN Human Development Report, India had slipped one place to rank 131st among 188 countries in the HDI.
Kant said ‘We are growing at around 7.5% and if our ambition is to grow at high rates like 10% over a three-decade period, (then) it is not possible to do this if we don’t improve the HDI for India’. He added that such growth was not possible if infant-mortality and maternal-mortality rates were at very high rates and if one in three children was stunted. Stating that there were around 200 backward districts in India, he underlined that it was not possible for the government alone to transform. Therefore, he said non-governmental organisations (NGOs) play a very important role.
Recently, Niti Aayog CEO had said that for India to grow at 9-10% for three decades consistently and reap the dividend of demographic advantage, promoting entrepreneurship among women has to be the key strategy. Noting that whenever the opportunity has been provided to women they have performed much better than men, he said, ‘Our belief is that if you want to transform India, then you need to give a huge fillip to women entrepreneurship’.
