Development: Class 10 Economics · Chapter 1

What would make life better for you? A Class 10 student in Patna might name a good college seat. Her grandmother might name a hospital close to home, and a farmer outside the city might name water for his fields in every season. Each answer is a small picture of development (विकास): the belief that life can improve, together with some idea of how to get there.

Behind these answers sit harder questions. Which needs should come first? Who should gain, and how fairly should the gains be shared? In this chapter we look at how people's ideas of progress differ, how we can measure development, and how states and countries can be compared. We also ask whether today's progress can last for people not yet born. History and political science will help you here too: the present grows out of the past, and in a democracy citizens settle these choices together.

1.1 What development promises — different people, different goals

Think of people you know: a neighbour who drives an auto-rickshaw, a cousin preparing for an engineering entrance test, a farmer whose fields wait for the monsoon. Ask each of them what progress would look like and the answers will differ. Each person asks first for whatever would change their situation the most.

Read down the right-hand column. The farmer thinks first of water and prices, the rider of security at work, the student of education and freedom. None of them is wrong. Their goals differ because their lives differ: where they live, what they own, what work they do and what holds them back. This gives us the first lesson of the chapter: people in different situations want different things from development.

Goals can also pull against each other. A shopkeeper may want the street widened so that more customers can drive up, while the vendors who sell vegetables along that street would lose their spots. A cement company may want to quarry a hill for limestone. The village below depends on that same hill for firewood, grazing and the springs that feed its wells. So a second lesson follows: one group's progress can be another group's loss, and it can even wreck someone's livelihood.

1.2 Income and other goals

Look again at Table 1.1. Almost every row asks, in some form, for more money: steadier work, better pay, a fair price for crops. More income lets a family eat better, keep its children in school and cope with illness. So more income is a goal that nearly everyone shares.

Now picture a worker who earns well but is spoken to rudely every day because of where he comes from. Or picture a young woman who earns a salary but needs permission to step out of the house. Neither would call that a good life, whatever the pay. People want to be treated as equals, to make their own choices, to feel safe and to be respected. A festival evening with your family costs little, yet you would not trade it for money: a good life is not made of goods alone.

No survey can easily score dignity or a sense of safety, so such goals tend to drop out of official reports. That is a weakness of the reports, not a sign that these goals matter less.

Here is how a mix of goals shows up in one real decision. Meera has just finished a nursing diploma. A private hospital in Mumbai offers her ₹45,000 a month on a one-year contract with frequent night shifts. The district hospital in her home town offers ₹32,000 a month in a permanent post with fixed hours. On pay alone, Mumbai wins. But Meera also weighs job security, time with her ageing parents and the chance to learn. Fig. 1.2 shows how the balance can shift.

Women's work shows how tangled these goals are. A woman with her own earnings often gains a stronger voice at home. Yet she may not be able to take a job at all. The streets may be unsafe after dark, or her family may still expect her to do all the housework. Income, safety and respect therefore depend on each other: progress in one makes progress in the others easier.

Developmental goals, then, come as a bundle: more income, together with equality, freedom, security, respect and a say in the decisions that shape one's life.

1.3 National development

Now scale the question up from one family to a country of more than 140 crore people. Ask your class what India should do to develop. You may hear: more factories, better government schools, cleaner rivers, more jobs in villages, faster trains, stronger action against corruption. Each idea has supporters, and some of them pull against others.

How, then, does a country choose? A few questions help. Does the plan help many people, or only a few? Is it fair to the people who will bear its costs? Is there a way to get most of the benefit with less harm? Thinking about national development means asking these questions openly, and settling them through public debate, courts, elections and the work of elected governments.

Fig. 1.3 follows one such plan. Whether the expressway counts as development depends on whose gains and losses we count, and on what is done for those who lose. Different people can hold different, and even conflicting, ideas of what is good for the country, and a fair process has to hear all of them.

1.4 How to compare different countries or states?

People often call some countries developed and others developing. If development means different things to different people, how can anyone sort countries like this? Start with a simpler puzzle.

Suppose your school must send one team to an inter-school quiz and another to a kabaddi tournament. You would not pick both teams by the same test: general knowledge matters for one, strength and speed for the other. Comparing countries works the same way. We first decide what we want to compare, then choose a few features that capture it, and finally measure everyone on those features.

For countries, the feature used most often is income. The reasoning is that with more income, people can buy more of what they need and want. So a country with a higher income is usually treated as more developed than one with less.

But which income? Adding up the incomes of everyone living in a country gives its total income. Total income is a poor yardstick for comparing countries, because their populations differ hugely. India's total income is several times Switzerland's, yet a typical Swiss resident is far richer than a typical Indian. India's income is shared among about 160 times as many people. What we really want to know is what an average person has. So we divide a country's total income by its population to get its average income, also called its per capita income (प्रति व्यक्ति आय).

How the World Bank groups countries

The World Bank uses income per person to sort the world's economies into four groups. Its yardstick is gross national income (GNI) per capita, converted into US dollars by a method (the Atlas method) that smooths out sudden swings in exchange rates. The groups are revised every year on 1 July.

India's GNI per capita was about 2,760 US dollars in 2025, which places it among the lower-middle-income countries. Countries in the high-income group are often called developed countries. The label is not usually given, though, to some oil-rich countries of West Asia or to a few very small countries.

Averages hide disparities

Averages are handy, but they can mislead. Take two imaginary villages with six households each. In Amli the monthly household incomes are ₹14,000, ₹16,000, ₹15,000, ₹17,000, ₹16,000 and ₹18,000. In Bakul they are ₹5,000, ₹6,000, ₹4,000, ₹7,000, ₹6,000 and ₹68,000.

Most people choose Amli: nobody there is very rich and nobody is very poor. An average gives one handy number for comparing places. But it is silent about who actually holds the income: whether it is distributed evenly or held by a few. Two places with the same average can be very different places to live.

1.5 Income and other criteria

Individuals, we saw, weigh far more than pay. Should we not judge a whole state the same way? Let us put income to the test with four states.

Judged by income alone, Telangana tops this group and Bihar comes last. Now read across the other columns. Kerala's income per person is about a fifth lower than Telangana's, yet its infant mortality rate (शिशु मृत्यु दर) is 5 against Telangana's 18. In other words, for every 1,000 babies born alive, 13 more die before their first birthday in Telangana. People in Kerala also live about four years longer on average, and more of its teenagers are enrolled in Classes 9 to 12.

The second pair tells a similar story. Madhya Pradesh has more than twice Bihar's income per person, but its infant mortality rate is 37 against Bihar's 23, and its people live shorter lives on average. On schooling, though, Madhya Pradesh is ahead. No single number captures everything: each indicator lights up a different part of people's lives.

Our table uses a close cousin of the attendance ratio, the gross enrolment ratio (GER). For Classes 9 to 12 it is the number enrolled in those classes, of any age, as a percentage of all young people aged 14 to 17. Because over-age students are counted too, a GER can even pass 100. Your textbook uses the net attendance ratio instead, while the literacy rate looks at reading and writing across all ages. All of them ask how many people are getting the education they need.

1.6 Public facilities

Why can a state with less income per person do better on health and schooling? Part of the answer is that a family's own earnings, however large, cannot purchase certain things at all. Several of the things that matter most reach a whole community together, or nobody at all.

Think of dengue. One family can empty its water cooler every week and sleep under mosquito nets. But if the drains on the street are blocked and a neighbour's old tyres collect rainwater, mosquitoes will still breed. Only a joint effort, with the municipality clearing drains and spraying and every household removing standing water, protects everyone. Clean air is similar: no family can filter a whole city's air for itself.

Shared provision is often the cheapest way too. One pipe network from a treatment plant to five hundred homes usually costs far less per home than five hundred private borewells and filters. It also avoids draining the groundwater house by house. Streetlights, a bus service, a library and a health centre each serve many people at a low cost per person. Fig. 1.6 shows how taxes paid by many become facilities used by all.

Your own education is a shared achievement as well. A school opens, and stays open, only because many families want their children taught and because public money pays for teachers, buildings and midday meals. Where a secondary school is missing, far away or unsafe to reach, many teenagers stop studying after Class 8 or 10. Worries about distance and safety keep girls at home especially often.

Kerala's lead in Table 1.4 owes much to public provision of this kind. For decades the state has invested in schools, literacy, health centres and nurses, so basic services reach most villages. Food works the same way. Under the Public Distribution System (PDS, सार्वजनिक वितरण प्रणाली), ration shops supply grain cheaply. Since January 2024, under a five-year central scheme (the PM Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana), about 81 crore people have received their monthly ration of grain free of cost. Families who can count on a working ration shop spend less on grain and have more left for milk, pulses and vegetables.

Measuring nutrition: body mass index

Good health starts with good nutrition. A quick way to check whether someone is underweight or overweight is the body mass index (BMI): weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in metres.

1.7 Human Development Report

If income is not enough, what else should we count? The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has given its answer since its first Human Development Report in 1990. It adds two things to income: how long and healthy people's lives are, and how much education they receive.

The three dimensions are combined into one number, the Human Development Index (HDI, मानव विकास सूचकांक), which runs from 0 to 1. Health is measured by life expectancy at birth. Education is measured by the years of schooling children can expect and the mean years of schooling of adults aged 25 and above. The standard of living is measured by GNI per person, converted into PPP dollars. The 2025 report, which uses data for 2023, ranks 193 countries; India is 130th, with an HDI of 0.685.

Read the table row by row and some surprises appear. Sri Lanka, with a far smaller population, beats India on all five measures. Bangladesh has a lower income per person than India, but its people live almost three years longer, and the two countries share rank 130. Bhutan has a higher income per person than Sri Lanka, yet ranks 36 places lower. The main reasons are that its adults have had far fewer years of schooling and its people live shorter lives. Nepal's children can now expect more years of school than India's, even though Nepal's income per person is about half of India's.

Compare any two countries, or any two Indian states, in the explorer below. Look for pairs where the richer place is not the healthier or better-educated one.

The report's title carries its message: it is about human development. Whatever an economy produces matters for what it does for people: whether they live long, learn, and live with dignity. Over the years UNDP has added companion measures. One of them adjusts the HDI for inequality within each country. In the 2025 report, inequality lowers India's HDI by about 31 per cent, one of the larger losses in the region. As the two villages showed, a national average can hide wide gaps.

1.8 Sustainability of development

Development that eats away its own base cannot last. A farmer who sells next season's seed to buy a new phone today will have no crop tomorrow. Countries face the same risk on a much larger scale. Since the 1960s, scientists have warned that the way the world grows cannot go on for ever. We dig out minerals, burn fuels, pump water and dump waste faster than nature can cope. That path may leave the next generations poorer.

In 1987 a United Nations commission chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway gave the idea a name in its report Our Common Future.

Groundwater: a renewable resource under strain

Groundwater is a renewable resource (नवीकरणीय संसाधन). Every monsoon, rain soaks into the soil and refills the layers of sand and rock that hold water underground. Renewable does not mean endless, though. If more water is pumped out each year than the rain puts back, the water table falls, wells must be dug deeper, and some eventually run dry.

Why does this happen? Several pressures push extraction up together. Farm pumps run on free or cheap electricity in many states, and water-hungry crops such as paddy and sugarcane are grown in dry regions. Cities are growing fast, and the ponds and wetlands that once soaked up rain are being built over. The remedies are well known: check dams and recharge pits, drip and sprinkler irrigation, crops suited to local rainfall, and rules that reward saving water.

Crude oil: a resource that runs out

Crude oil, coal and natural gas took millions of years to form, so for all practical purposes the Earth holds a limited amount of each. They are non-renewable resources (अनवीकरणीय संसाधन): every barrel burned is gone for good. Exploration does turn up new deposits. But a discovery only reveals oil that was already there; it does not make more, so the total can only shrink.

How long will a stock last? A simple estimate divides the known reserves by the amount used each year.

Pollution ignores borders. Winter smoke from burning crop stubble drifts across several states, and carbon dioxide released anywhere warms every country. Our futures are bound together. Problems like these cannot be solved by one subject alone, so ecologists, engineers, economists and philosophers increasingly work on them together.

Development is a question that every generation answers afresh. As citizens and as individuals, we will keep asking what a good life is and who gets to share in it. We will also ask what we owe to people not yet born.