The present development has not been able to address the issues of social injustice, regional imbalances and environmental degradation. On the contrary, it is being widely considered as the prime cause of the social distributive injustices, deterioration in the quality of life and human development, ecological crisis and social unrest. Does development create, reinforce and perpetuate these crises? Thus, it was thought to take up human development as a separate issue against the prevalent western views of development which considers development as the remedy to all the ills including human development, regional disparities and environmental crisis. Concerted efforts were made to look at development critically at various times in the past. But, most systematic effort towards this was the publication of the First Human Development Report by United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in 1990. Since then, this organization has been bringing out World Human Development Report every year. This report does not only define human development, make amendments and changes its indicators but also ranks all the countries of the world based on the calculated scores. According to the Human Development Report 1993, “progressive democratization and increasing empowerment of people are seen as the minimum conditions for human development”. Moreover, it also mentions that “development must be woven around people, not the people around development” as was the case previously. You have already studied the concepts, indicators and approaches to human development and methods of calculating the index in your book, “Fundamentals of Human Geography.” In this chapter, let us try to understand the applicability of these concepts and indicators to India.