Gender Development Index and Gender Empowerment Measure are two gender-based indicators provided by the United Nations Development Program. Population share of the genders enter the formulation of these indicators in such a way that it favours the better performing gender. This can lead to...

Provision of modern energy services for cooking (gaseous fuels) and lighting (electricity) is an essential component of any policy aiming to address health, education or welfare issues; yet it gets little attention from policymakers. Secure, adequate, low-cost energy of quality and convenience...

The popularly known Human Development Index (HDI) is obtained through linear averaging (LA) of indices in three dimensions - health, education and standard of living. LA method assumes perfect substitutability among the indices. We question its appropriateness and propose an alternative measure,...

The selection of optimum number of indicators is the key to any Sustainable Development Indicator (SDI) research. Indicators, too less in number may be inadequate to convey the message and; too many may dilute the purpose. To arrive at a limited number of indicators from a larger set of potential...

We impose a value judgment that a decrease in failure should be accompanied by a decrease in gap (difference or ratio) between sub-groups. In other words, the same gap at lower levels of failure is to be considered worse off. This, in line with transfer sensitivity axiom of poverty indices, is...

Using Minkowski distance function we propose a class of Human Development Index measures. Special cases of this turn out to be the popularly used linear average method as also a newly proposed displaced ideal method. Two measures of penalty are suggested. One captures the non-uniform attainment...

The conventional measure of Human Development Index (HDI) is a linear average across dimensions, HDI1. Under this, poor attainments in any dimension gets perfectly compensated for better attainments in any other dimension HDI2, which is based on Euclidean distance measuring shortfall from the...

There was a boom in the development of sustainable development indicators (SDIs) after notion of sustainability became popular through Bruntland Commissions report. Since then numerous efforts have been made worldwide in constructing SDIs at global, national and local scales, but in India not a...

Presently India is facing the twin challenge of energy universalization as well as emission reduction. Nearly 0.4 billion people in India mostly residing in rural areas do not have access to electricity and more than 0.8 billion people do not use modern cooking fuels. Provision of energy...