FORUM (Spotlight Weekly)

Human Development Issues In Developing Countries

By DEEPAK R. JOSHI

Human development remains a big challenge for developing countries, with human capital becoming the most vital aspect of development efforts. The most indispensable capabilities for human development are to ensure long and healthy lives, to be knowledgeable of to have access to the resources needed to maintain a high standard of living, and to be able to participate in the life of the community. Human development shares a common vision with human rights.

Human development is an integral part of management development, a systemic process of improving managerial effectiveness, increasing productivity, augmenting human capital by imparting education, training, knowledge, by increasing skills, changing attitudes and enhancing human quality. As management guru Dale S. Beach says, "Management development is a systematic process of training and growth by which individuals gain and apply knowledge, skills, insights and attitudes to manage work organizations effectively."

The emphasis of management development is on handling situations, people and problems for better results. Human development is contemporary to human resources development through which individual and community growth can be achieved in its fullest potential. Education is the major contributor to that process, because it directly and continuously affects the formation not only of knowledge and abilities, but also of character and of culture, aspirations and achievements.

Human development, human resource development and human resource management should be carried in a network of components in which things are interrelated and interacted, and act simultaneously to achieve the ascribed goals.

Across the world, we see unacceptable levels of deprivation in peopleís lives. Of the 4.6 billion people in developing countries, more than 850 million are illiterate, nearly a billion lack access to improved water resources and 2.4 billion lack access to basic sanitation. Nearly 325 million children are out of school and 11 million children under age five die each year from preventable causes.

The ultimate goal of human development is sovereignty (freedom). Bondage is an outlandish reality that developing countries are not precisely in a hurry to pay heed to. Moreover, the citizens are in a ever-changing ferocious cycle of life. Kamaiyas in Nepal and the people of Jharkhand in India have raised the voice of freedom, but they are compelled to survive in dispossession and destitution.

The rhetoric of "liberation", "human rights", "social security", and "poverty alleviation" become unbearably loud during paper presentations, elections, interaction programs, coffee talks, workshops, seminars, and conferences.

The United Nations Development Program has advocated the Human Development Index (HDI) to measure actual human progress. It captures three dimensions: real per capita income, adult literacy, and life expectancy. South Asia and Sub-Saharan African are far behind other regions.

The adult literacy rate in South Africa is still 55 percent and in Sub-Saharan Africa 60 percent, well below the developing country average of 73 percent. Life expectancy at birth in Sub-Saharan Africa is still only 48.8 years, compared with more than 60 in all other regions. Moreover, the share of people living on less than $1 a day is as high as 46 percent in South Asia, compared with 15 percent in East Asia and the Pacific and in Latin America. If the governments of this region want foreign capital and overseas markets, they must create investor-friendly as well as socio-friendly political and economic systems. They should concentrate on reducing poverty by providing quality education, employment opportunities, fair remuneration, safe drinking water and better health services.

The recession virus this time is being spread not only by currency speculators, but also by the collapse in America's information technology investment. Many developing countries blame the overseas slump for all their economy woes. Some will wrongly conclude that further globalization should therefore be resisted. Actually, everybody would ultimately benefit from a globally incorporated market when there is assortment of demand and production in long-term perspective.

These large deal surpluses of these regions are widely seen as a sign of renewed economic strength. In fact, they partly reflect a failure to generate stronger domestic demand as a result of not completing promised structural reforms. Poor countries occupy two-thirds of world's population, and suffer marginalization once through incomes and again through prices. Part of the reason may be that elite in developing countries, like their counterparts in the rich world, are content to deem either that world inequality is falling, or that inequality is good because it is the source of incentives. Growing inequality is analogous to global warming. Its effects are far-reaching and long-term, and there is always something more pressing to deal with.

Differences among regions and countries are predominantly noticeable in economic growth, which generates public resources to invest in education and health services and increases the resources people have to enjoy a well-brought-up standard of living and perk up many other aspects of their lives. Economically active population in the labor force is the prompt focus of human resource development (HDR). Labor force represents physical energies and by imparting knowledge, skills and attitudes, HRD converts labor force into human resources. It has been found that HRD helps to enhance knowledge, skills, attitudes and experiences of employees and gives efficiency and effectiveness on the job. Majority of the economically active population of this region on most days has to go without food. As a result, most of them relapse into a life of stand-in repression.

Productivity is direct utility of the level of human resources in any economy but the issue of productivity is shadowed in this region. The productivity level of inhabitants of this region has been found to be very low, for there is lack of adequate education, skill development activities and vocational training facilities. Although capital-labor ratios show an increasing trend, the census input-output ratio are near constant, which shows that increasing capital intensity has helped little in increasing productivity. In the context of improving productivity, wages, employment and overall social as well as industrial relations, workers could be social partners for sustainable development, but South Asia lags behind. A higher level of productivity is determined by many factors such as education to all, employment to all, appropriate wages and fringe benefits, on-the-job training, and skill development and provision of health and safety nets.

The large part of the region’s work force lies in the informal sector, which is not considered at the policy making, implementing and monitoring stages. There is a need to minimize advertisement of informal sector workers to the possible extent, for this sector is circumscribed by structural constraints such as long working hours, low payment rate, widespread use of child labor, existence of bonded labor, highly influenced gender discrimination, absence of minimum wages and non-existence of social security measures.

The high demand of skill-oriented activities is not pauperizing rather suffering from various problems like imitated policies, demand less programs, lack of sound monitoring policy, poor quality control, poor coordination, unmanaged regulatory system, urban bias, cost factor, politicization, lack of commitment, unequal distribution of opportunities, cultural and traditional aspects to some extent. Policy is a guideline for decision making to achieve the targeted goals and HRD policy greatly affects the HRD process, which is concerned with enhancing human capability.