The India Human Development Report 2011 makes a number of mistakes in its analysis of the relative performance of states and also offers conceptually wrong perspectives in its comparison of the sectoral performance in health and education.

While inequality in per capita state domestic product in India tends to increase, state-level indicators of human development show decreasing dispersion for the obvious reason that the standard outcome indicators of health or education have natural upper limits. Does it mean that instead of worrying about disparity in social indicators we should rather focus on disparity in per capita income?