That India ranks 129th among 189 countries in the human development index compiled by the United Nations Development Programme is not a major surprise, nor that it is still ahead of other South Asian countries save Sri Lanka. Yet, there are some positive facets that deserve to be noted. One, the difference between India's rank on percapita income and that on human development is negative, meaning that India ranks, admittedly among several nations, higher on human development than on income. That is to say, somehow, India is managing to do better on human development than what would be warranted if a one-to-one relationship existed between income and human development. Two, gender bias seems to be coming down, with girls entering school expected to spend more time there than boys entering school. The 2019 Human Development Report is a fairly political document. Its central message is that it is urgent to tackle inequality, even as poverty comes down and the gap between basic development indicators such as life expectancy at birth narrows across the world. Inequality builds up over an individual's lifetime and gets entrenched. By its very nature, the report is about the globe. However, this warning would apply to large countries like India with great regionaland social disparities. Ending inequality of opportunity had been identified, at the time of Independence, as a part of India's tryst with destiny. The advances in extending human capability enabled by developments in technology and organisation have been so immense that those with access to those advances and those without end up, as it were, on different planets. India's own internal Human Development Index has shown that while all sections of India's hierarchical society have been converging, the tribes of central India have been trailing. The data show that with one-third the expenditure India makes, as a proportion of GDP, on education, Bangladesh makes comparable achievements on several fronts. This brings out the general point that human development is more than splurging money.