The Status of Human Development in North-East India: A Multivariate Analysis Golab Chandra Nandi 1 Introduction Human Development has now been accepted as the ultimate goal of human activity and has replaced economic growth, which was emphasized till the 1980s. It is now widely accepted that gross domestic product (GDP) or gross national income (GNI) per capita is an inadequate indicator of the development level of a country as many important dimensions of well-being are imperfectly captured by it (e.g. Sen, 1998 , UNDP, 1990). United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in its first report on human development (HDR 1990) introduced the concept of human development index as a composite measure of economic progress and human welfare. The work of Mahbub ul Haq, Amartya Sen and others provided the conceptual foundation for an alternative and broader development approach defined as a process of enlarging people’s choices and enhancing human capabilities (the range of things people can be and do) and freedoms, enabling them to: live a long and healthy life, have access to knowledge and a decent standard of living, and participate in the life of their community and decisions affecting their lives. In its annual Human Development Report (HDR) the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) publishes the Human Development Index (HDI), which is a composite index for human development. Based loosely on Sen’s capability approach, the HDI quantifies the average achievement of a country in three dimensions, namely a long and healthy life, measured by the Life Expectancy Index (LEI); knowledge, measured by an Education Index (EI); and a decent standard of living, measured by the GDP Index (GDPI), and is meant to capture those dimensions of well-being that are closely correlated with income (such as housing, nutrition, clothing, etc). The UNDP argues that the simple average scheme is used, not just for simplicity, but because the three dimensions are equally important. But, the critics argue that though the components of the HDI are important aspects of human development, the weighting procedure is certainly unsettling (Kelly, 1991; Noorbakhsh, 1998; Srinivasan, 1994; Ravallion, 1997; Grimm et al., 2008). Is there any reason to suspect that education is exactly as important in determining 1 Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, S. S. College, Hailakandi, e-mail: golab.nandi56@gmail.com