Assessing Human Development in Nepal through Descriptive and Cluster Analysis: Progress and Disparities

Human Development Reports initiated by Amartya Sen and Mahbub ul Haq in 1990 have been regularly published by United Nations Development Programme featuring the gender and human development assessment. Nepal has been publishing its Human Development Reports since 1998. According to the reports, Human Development Index (HDI) of Nepal was found increasing from 0.399 in 1990 to 0.602 in 2021 with a 50.88% improvement compared to 1990. Moreover, notable progress has been found in the area of gender and human development but significant disparities still persist among different castes, ethnicities and regions. We examined human development related indexes of Nepal focusing on gender, caste/ethnicity, regional, rural-urban disparities. We applied descriptive methods and cluster analysis for classification of districts of Nepal using published secondary data. The K-mean cluster analysis based upon averaged district level estimates for the period 1996–2011 with five clusters showed relatively optimum classification scheme with average HDIs ranging between 0.33 and 0.58, low intra-cluster variances (0.0001–0.0020) and a high Silhouette score (0.593). Considering average HDI data, only 3 districts were in medium HDI category (0.55 ≤ HDI < 0.70) and rest of the 74 districts were in low HDI category (HDI ≤ 0.55). Moreover, cluster analysis showed 4 districts with highest cluster centroid (0.58) that belong to medium HDI category. In conclusion, there exists urgent need to cope with human development related issues for formulating development policies and strategies in Nepal.