Current State of Human Resource Development in India

India today sits in an odd spot. It is one of the fastest-growing large economies in the world, its billionaires multiply, its startups turn into unicorns, and its space missions make global headlines. Yet ask a simple question: are Indians, on average, healthier, better nourished, and better educated than their income growth would suggest? The honest answer is complicated. This is the heart of what economists call human resource development (HRD) at the national level, and it explains why growth in GDP alone never tells the full story of a country’s progress.

Why education and health are treated as rights, not privileges 🔗

Human resource development rests on a simple idea: people are not just inputs to production, they are the point of development itself. A country can build highways and factories, but if its citizens are undernourished, poorly schooled, or without access to a doctor, that infrastructure cannot be used to its full potential. This is why India’s Constitution and subsequent legislation increasingly treat education and health not as optional public services but as entitlements. The Right to Education Act made elementary education a legal right, and courts have repeatedly read the right to health into the fundamental right to life under Article 21.

The two pillars working together 🔗

Education and health are not separate boxes to be ticked; they reinforce each other. A malnourished child struggles to concentrate in school. A poorly educated adult is less likely to seek preventive healthcare or understand nutrition labels. This is why national planning documents, from Five-Year Plans to NITI Aayog strategy papers, keep circling back to this pairing whenever they discuss the quality of India’s workforce.

The calorie paradox: growth without nourishment 🔗

One of the most puzzling chapters in India’s development story is what economists call the calorie consumption puzzle. Between 1983 and 2009-10, real household expenditure in rural India rose sharply, yet average calorie intake actually fell. Research based on National Sample Survey data shows this decline occurred even though a large share of the population still consumed fewer calories than recommended nutritional norms.

Several explanations compete for attention: households may be spending more on non-food essentials like healthcare, transport, and mobile recharges, leaving less for food; diets may be diversifying away from cheap, calorie-dense cereals toward more expensive but less calorie-rich foods; or declining physical activity may be genuinely lowering calorie needs. None of these explanations fully resolves the puzzle, and that ambiguity itself is telling. It means income growth in India has not automatically translated into better nutritional outcomes for a large section of the population, which is precisely why nutrition security remains a distinct policy goal rather than something economic growth is expected to solve on its own.

Malnutrition and child health: real progress, persistent gaps 🔗

The good news is that recent data shows meaningful improvement. The sixth National Family Health Survey, covering 2023-24, found that full immunisation coverage among children rose from 83.8 per cent to 87.1 per cent, institutional deliveries climbed past 90 per cent, and childhood stunting declined compared to the previous round of the survey. Programmes like the Universal Immunisation Programme, POSHAN Abhiyaan, and Ayushman Bharat have visibly moved the needle.

But the deeper problem hasn’t disappeared 🔗

Despite this progress, roughly one in three Indian children still shows signs of chronic undernutrition through stunted growth, and malnutrition remains a leading cause of poor learning outcomes and disease vulnerability in early childhood. Longer-term tracking across multiple survey rounds also shows India now facing a double burden: undernutrition among children persists even as obesity and lifestyle-related diseases rise among adults, particularly women. In other words, India is fighting two very different nutrition battles at the same time, with limited resources to fight both.

The healthcare infrastructure gap 🔗

Even when nutrition and immunisation programmes work well, they cannot compensate for weak healthcare delivery on the ground. India’s overall doctor-to-population ratio has technically caught up with the World Health Organization’s benchmark of one doctor per thousand people, but this national average masks a sharp urban-rural divide. Peer-reviewed research on India’s rural health workforce notes that Community Health Centres, which serve nearly 64 per cent of India’s population, faced a shortfall of over 17,500 specialists as of 2023, including nearly 4,500 physicians.

Why doctors avoid rural postings 🔗

The reasons are structural, not just about salaries. Weak diagnostic equipment, unreliable power supply, poor housing for staff, and limited career growth all push qualified doctors toward cities. The result is a two-tier health system: reasonably well-staffed urban hospitals sitting alongside rural centres that technically exist on paper but cannot deliver specialist care, emergency obstetrics, or advanced diagnostics when needed most.

What global indices tell us 🔗

India’s position in international rankings offers a useful, if imperfect, snapshot of how these pieces fit together. Two indices are particularly relevant to human resource development.

Human Capital Index: a persistent underperformance 🔗

The World Bank’s Human Capital Index continues to rank India well behind several countries with comparable or lower per capita income, including Bangladesh and Vietnam. This is not because India lacks resources; it reflects how unevenly those resources reach children in terms of nutrition, quality schooling, and safe environments during their most formative years.

Global Innovation Index: an encouraging counterpoint 🔗

Interestingly, the picture is not uniformly bleak. India’s Global Innovation Index ranking has improved sharply, reaching 38th place in 2025, driven by strong performance in knowledge and technology outputs, ICT services exports, and a maturing startup ecosystem. This shows that India’s higher-education and research institutions, at least at the top end, are producing world-class output even while the broader base of human capital, especially child health and basic education quality, continues to lag. The gap between these two rankings is itself instructive: India is building islands of excellence faster than it is raising the overall floor.

Towards integrated strategies 🔗

The consistent lesson from HRD research is that piecemeal interventions rarely work. A nutrition scheme without safe drinking water access, or an immunisation drive without functioning cold-chain logistics in rural clinics, only goes so far. What tends to move the needle is convergence, multiple schemes and departments working on the same population simultaneously. NFHS-6’s improved outcomes are partly credited to exactly this kind of convergence between the Integrated Child Development Services network, Anganwadi centres, immunisation drives, and maternal health schemes acting together rather than in isolation.

Going forward, three priorities stand out for India’s HRD strategy: closing the rural-urban gap in health infrastructure through better incentives for specialist doctors, ensuring nutrition programmes reach children before stunting sets in during the first two years of life, and aligning school education quality with the same ambition India has shown in higher education and research. None of these are new ideas, but the data suggests execution, not intent, remains the bottleneck.

What do you think? Given that India’s Global Innovation Index ranking has improved dramatically while its Human Capital Index ranking has stayed largely stagnant, does this suggest India’s growth model is creating pockets of excellence while leaving the broader population behind? And can targeted programmes like POSHAN Abhiyaan realistically close a nutrition gap that has persisted since the 1980s, or does it require a completely different policy approach?

References

1. https://www.ideasforindia.in/topics/human-development/what-explains-declining-calorie-consumption-in-india
2. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/national-family-health-survey-6-2023-24
3. https://www.unicef.org/india/reports/indias-progress-malnutrition-and-non-communicable-diseases-insights-nfhs
4. https://www.ijcmph.com/index.php/ijcmph/article/view/15551
5. https://humancapital.worldbank.org/en/indicator/WB_HCP_HCI
6. https://www.wipo.int/gii-ranking/en/india