Sustainable Human Well-being: An Alternative Development Principle and Its Measurement

The concept of development has evolved with changing times. However, countries around the world are still governed by few well-known traditional measurement indicators namely gross national income and human development index. This paper tries to make a case for including environmental dimension among the factors that have influential role in shaping human welfare. It also proposes to qualify a country as potentially unsustainable if its ecological footprint bio-capacity index is equal to or more than 0.5. Associating human development index with sustainability in this way would allow the world to discover which nations are forfeiting the development of future generations. The study measures and makes a comparative analysis of HDI and SHDI and recommends the means to modify human development index with the environmental component to measure sustainable human well-being so as to set the targets right.