TN human development report - 2017 : Chennai slips in HDI rank, Kovai out of top 5

CHENNAI: As Tamil Nadu has pitched an ambitious target to attract a whopping Rs 3.43 lakh crore of fresh industrial investments at the just concluded second ‘Global Investors Meet (GIM)’, several new facets of the state’s economic development experience during nearly two decades 1993-94 to 2011-12 have come to light.

While the state’s overall growth profile shows it has reached new impressive heights with regards to “attainment in health and education” besides per capital income (PCI)’, underpinning this macro-trend are several paradoxes and reverses that pose new challenges to the sustainability of the social justice-driven growth model Tamil Nadu has been known for several decades now.

The “Tamil Nadu Human Development Report – 2017”, which has been recently placed in the public domain, only the second such report in recent years after the first had come out in 2003, comes as a huge eye-opener on several fronts that weave the fabric of development. They reflect its changing colours, equitable in parts, but also raising new inequities in the process, district and gender-wise.

The report’s primary focus is not just on aggregate incomes going up, though PCI continues to a key growth indicator. The TNHDR, a comprehensive and critical study of achievements, trends and prognosis for the future by the State Planning Commission, Government of Tamil Nadu, mirrors the big picture of human development that is broad-based, based on the UNDP criteria.

It incorporates “more comprehensive measures of poverty, MPI or multi-poverty index, gender inequality index (GII), food security index (FSI), and child development index (CDI).

The report at the outset makes clear that following the UNDP methodology, the Human Development Index (HDI) for each district has been determined on the basis of three indicators - per capita income (PCI) as a determinant of standard of living, health indicators like life expectancy at birth, child sex ratio and Maternal Mortality rate (MMR), even as access to knowledge (education) assessed on the literacy rate and gross enrolment ratios (GER) at primary and secondary levels.

While the HDI index in the 2003 report had ranked Chennai, Kancheepuram, Kanyakumari, Thoothukudi and Coimbatore among the top five districts, the latest HDR report-2017 shows that Kanyakumari has marched ahead to take the first position. Surprisingly, Virdhunagar district has taken the second slot now, followed by Thoothukudi and Chennai has slid to the fourth slot, followed by Kancheepuram. Coimbatore district does not even figure in the top five now.

Among the “bottom five districts” in the HDI index, Ariyalur has the lowest HDI index at 0.282, followed by Perambalur, Theni, Villupuram and Tiruvarur districts in that order. The “bottom five” districts in the previous HDR were Perambalur, Villupuram, Dharmapuri, Tirunelveli and Pudukkottai. The latest report adds that though the two sets of indices are “not strictly comparable” as after 2003 some of the districts have been bifurcated; still Perambalur and Villupuram districts continue to be among the bottom five with regard to the overall HDI index.

The most women-friendly district is Nilgiris that has the lowest gender inequality. Kanyakumari has the highest health indicators in terms of low MMR and high institutional deliveries. Interestingly, Virudhunagar has the “highest female political representation”, even as female agricultural wage was the highest in Salem district (Rs 258.11 per day) and lowest in Villupuram (Rs 74.88 per day).

Chennai, with its adjoining districts of Kancheepuram and Tiruvallur which are now among the most highly industrailised belt in the state, has its own paradoxes.

Though it retains top slot in ‘life expectancy at birth’ and the second position in ‘literacy rate’, the report, citing the NSSO figures, says that with regard to youth employment, “among all the metros, the levels of unemployment are highest in Chennai.” With very high gross enrollment ratios (GER) in 18-23 age group, and better access to education and rising aspirations, educated youth in Greater Chennai do not get the type of jobs they would like to have, and hence the level of “educated unemployed” is the highest for Chennai, going by GER in 2012-13. Tirupur district in contrast, “has high living standards but without comparable attainments in health or education.”

Yet, in terms of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), while Tamil Nadu ranks third at the national level, within the state, it is Chennai that has received FDI of about Rs 67,964 crore between April 2010 and May 2014, most of it in ICT (Information, Communication Technology) and automobile sectors. Again, it is the IT sector that has been sustaining the growing jobs in Chennai.

In terms of per capita income (PCI), at 2004-05 prices, Tamil Nadu’s has gone up from Rs 30,000 that year, to Rs 62,361 in 2013-14, says the report. This is notwithstanding the “wide disparity” in PCI among districts, with Kanyakumari having a PCI four times of Perambalur district. And 18 districts in Tamil Nadu have a PCI lower than the state’s average PCI, an indication of the skewed income distribution across the state.

Another revealing trend that comes out from the latest HDR report is related to poverty levels. During the period 2005-06 to 2013-14, the state’s economy grew at an average rate of 9.20 per cent. Contribution of agriculture and allied activities to the Net State Domestic Product (NSDP) though dropped to 8.70 per cent in 2011-12 from 11.65 per cent in 2004-05. Small and marginal farmers have been the worst hit. While manufacturing sector contributed to 17.50 per cent of the NSDP in 2011-12, the bulk of that value has come from construction sector. It is only the growth in services sector that has offset the losses in the first two.

However, a huge plus of the last nearly two decades has been the significant drop in the proportion of poor people to the total population. The poverty ratio as it is called saw a big slide in rural areas from 51.20% in 1993-94 to 15.80% in 2011-12, which it says is a 34 percentage points reduction in rural poverty “during the past two decades”. And urban poverty for the same period dropped from 33.80% to 6.60%.

The poverty rate decline has been visibly so significant for Tamil Nadu, that it takes much of the sting of the political criticism about the Dravidian parties that “corruption has eaten into the vitals of the administration”. In fact, the substantial reduction in rural and urban poverty at the macro-level since the economic reforms of the early 1990s’, clearly show that poverty alleviation and social welfare programmes have delivered in improving incomes of the poor, even if socio-economic equity is a distant dream amid other micro-level issues.