David C Engerman’s Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made traces the history of six individuals—Jagdish Bhagwati, Mahbub ul Haq, Lal Jayawardena, Amartya Sen, Manmohan Singh and Rehman Sobhan—who, through their work and scholarship, shaped development thought in the twentieth century. This excerpt from the book, published by Penguin Random House, India, focusses on the figures and institutions who participated in the Human Development project and “the grandiose goal of formulating a measurement of ‘the human condition.’” It recounts the various questions and critiques that cropped up around it, explaining how differences in approach became “glaringly apparent in the debate over creating the Human Development Index.”
THE MOST CONSISTENT and energetic programme to devise a new development metric took place at the North–South Roundtable led by the Haqs. After Mahbub left the World Bank in 1982 and occupied a succession of posts in Pakistan’s cabinet, Khadija, the North–South Roundtable’s executive director, convened a series of meetings that redefined the term Human Development. Up until the mid 1980s, Human Development often carried with it a connotation of human resource development, which focussed on policies to create a better-educated and healthier work force—a form of what had earlier been called “manpower planning.” While this vision drew attention to health and especially education, it did so with the assumption that workers were primarily economic resources—the means, not the ends, of development.
A series of meetings organised by Khadija Haq and the Turkish diplomat-turned-UN-official Üner Kirdar expanded the meaning beyond personnel issues. In their initial foray into “human resource development” in 1984, Khadija Haq insisted upon a narrow meaning of the term; the key to “self-sustaining, stable economic development,” she concluded, required “the development of human resources,” which in turn meant “the development of management capabilities.” Haq and Kirdar’s next conference, examining the debt crisis in the 1980s, echoed Human Development with the same connotation: “human resource building.”
By 1986, Khadija Haq and Kirdar had settled on the term Human Development, dropping “resources,” but had yet to expand its meaning. Their workshop, “Human Development: The Neglected Dimension,” still carried with it the inflection of human resources, calling for “skills cooperation” between countries in the Global South. And two years later, in her wonkiest conference yet, Khadija Haq convened a group to discuss development in the context of “the informatics revolution.”