India should announce life expectancy annually: PM-EAC

Spread the love

By Our Special Correspondent

New Delhi, March 16: Haunted by the bashing by the international agencies for faltering on social indicators, the Economic Advisory Council to PM (PM-EAC) in a research paper has called for India to have own benchmarks to gauge the key gains on socio-economic development. Stating that the Indian and Ghanian children are naturally shorter in height, the paper questioned ‘One Size Fits All’ approach of the international agencies, including the United Nations, while arguing that the US has its own yardsticks.

Sanjeev Sanyal, Aakanksha Arora and Srishti Chauhan “investigated the claims of the international organisations that India’s socio-economic indicators are stagnant or deteriorating despite higher per capita income, said the PM-EAC.

“The paper looks into three widely used data-driven development indicators i.e., Childhood Stunting (India’s NFHS estimates based on WHO growth standards), Female Labour Force Participation Rate (FLFPR) by ILO, and Life Expectancy at Birth by UN. Childhood stunting, a malnutrition indicator, affects 35.5 per cent of Indian children under five as per the NFHS 2019-21, based on WHO growth standards,” said the paper.

However, it added, the WHO standards were set using a small sample from affluent areas of just six countries, including India. “Even in this benchmark study, Indian children were smaller on average than those of other countries. Therefore, India needs to revisit local measurements to better gauge malnutrition,” argued the paper.

It further stated that India’s female labour force participation rate (FLFPR) is one of the lowest in the world at 24 per cent as per ILO’s latest 2022 estimates, far below even emerging economies like Vietnam and Tanzania. “However, India’s PLFS does not capture economically productive work done by women like poultry farming, milking of cows, etc., as part of their domestic duties. This pushes a significant proportion of women in the active labor force into the ‘out of labor force’ category,” argued the paper.

Economic Survey 2022-23 estimated an augmented FLFPR of 46.2 per cent for 2020-21 compared to the official PLFS estimate of 32.5 per cent, it said, while adding that “ILO research paper also identified the same issue and re-estimated FLFPR from 31.2 per cent to 56.4 per cent for 2012”.

The researchers also asserted that according to the United Nations Population Division, India’s Life Expectancy at Birth estimate has sharply declined by 3.67 years from 70.91 in 2019 to 67.24 in 2021. This indicator has a one-third weight in UNDP’s Human Development Index.

“The UN agency claims that the decline in India’s Life Expectancy at Birth estimate reflects COVID-19 related mortality. However, this assumption is conceptually flawed, and India has repeatedly objected to WHO’s excess death estimates,” the paper said, adding that “authors’ calculations reveal that India’s toll stood at 375.8 when calibrated per one lakh population, compared to Brazil (645.4), U.S. (606.7), and Italy (587.7). The paper recommends that the Registrar General of India should publish life expectancy estimates every year.”