COLLEGE PARK, Md. - The India Human Development Survey (IHDS) is a nationally representative, multi-topic survey of 41,554 households in 1,503 villages and 971 urban neighborhoods across India. Two one-hour interviews in each household covered health, education, employment, economic status, marriage, fertility, gender relations and social capital. Children aged 8-11 completed short reading, writing and arithmetic tests and village, school, and medical facility interviews were held. Fieldwork began in November 2004 and was mostly completed by October 2005. The IHDS team, led by University of Maryland sociologists Sonalde Desai (pictured right) and Reeve Vanneman (pictured left), will extend their seminal work in India with a second wave of surveys set to begin next year under two new grants from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) totaling $5.7 million. IHDS was designed to complement existing Indian surveys by bringing together a wide range of topics in a single survey. This breadth permits analyses of associations across a range of social and economic conditions. For example, studying children’s outcomes (e.g., learning, immunizations) requires joint consideration of the role of poverty, family structure, gender relations, community context and the availability of facilities. The survey also provides insight into the social traditions that still govern the life of women in India today. The second wave of surveys, labeled IHDS-II, will provide a multi-topic, multi-purpose source of data for international and Indian research on health, education, income, employment, gender and social inequality – within the context of vast changes since 2005. Data collection will be expanded to include new modules to study regional disparities in health and education and there will be a follow-up on the 8-11 year olds as they begin to make their transitions to adulthood, thus permitting an examination of young adulthood in India. The second survey will also permit an analysis of two major government programs initiated since 2005 – the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), which will create new opportunities to investigate the causes of gender inequalities in employment, education and health. Sonalde Desai is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and a member of the executive committee of the Maryland Population Research Center (MPRC); Reeve Vanneman is a professor and chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland as well as a MPRC faculty associate. The survey team includes personnel from India's National Council of Applied Economic Research. Funding comes from NICHD. The College of Behavioral and Social Sciences (BSOS) is home to nine academic departments, including the nation’s No. 1-ranked Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Four university research centers are based in the college, which also has more than 30 other centers and clinics addressing topics from speech deficiencies and brain imaging to international economics and world peace. Based on degrees awarded, BSOS is the largest of the 12 colleges and schools at the university and offers four of the five most popular majors on campus. Last year, the college’s faculty brought in more than $57 million in research support from organizations like the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and others. Photos courtesy of Sonalde Desai. For more information: Ryan Holtz Office of the Dean College of Behavioral & Social Sciences University of Maryland 2141 Tydings Hall College Park, MD 20742 301-405-7515 TEL 301-314-9086 FAX E-mail: rholtz@bsos.umd.edu

This is a comparison of the HDI of Brazilian states with the HDI of countries around the world. This was available in Wikipedia and uses data from 2005. Countries are repeated because of the nature of the data involved. This is a difficult map to understand, specially for Brazilians. How is it possible that, with the degree of economic development we have attained in Brazil, states can still perform very poorly. For some chauvinists in the State of Sao Paulo, it is difficult to understand that HDI of their proud state is actually not higher than that of (to their eyes) underdeveloped Romania? The HDI is a complex indicator, based on three main indicators: life expectancy, education and per capita GDP. Life expectancy rates in Brazil are greatly reduced because of urban violence related to drug traffic and the possibility to own guns (and use them indiscriminately). Education is still one of the biggest problems in Brazil, with the Economist (the magazine) recently declaring that Brazilian schools were no long disastrous, they were just "very bad". This makes me think that economic development in Brazil is not really sustainable in the long run, unless something is done about the quality of the education offered. Another aspect difficult for (middle-class) Brazilians to understand is that these indicators are based on AVERAGES. Of course, there are excellent schools in Brazil and even better universities, but the average pupil needs to go to very bad schools, with extremely badly paid teachers. About GDP per capita: with all its economic development, Brazil has not been able to attain very high positions in GDP per capita. However, this indicator actually helps put Brazil in a better position in the HDI list. There is a lot of money there. However, the other two indicators check any pretence: there is a lot of money but it is so badly distributed that people are unable to have access to good schooling and health care.