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A Human Well-Being Perspective to the Measurement of Quality of Life: Findings From the City of Delhi

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Abstract

This study employs Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach to assess the quality of life of people in Delhi. Despite recording the highest per capita income in the country, Delhi remains a city-state of many inequalities causing huge disparities in the living conditions of the rich and the poor. Here I assess peoples’ perception of these disparities using five sets of well-being dimensions; psychological distress, social interactions and leisure activities, sheltering conditions, health status, and economic status & working conditions. Using a stratified random sample of 330 households (1,267 individuals aged atleast 18 years) and plurality of well-being dimensions, survey responses are quantified using fuzzy set theory, an approach designed to handle inexact and fuzzy outcomes. The results show that around 31 % of Delhi’s population is deprived of social interactions and leisure activities, over 25 % of people have very poor health status and around 14 % have very poor economic and working conditions. Education, in particular, is found to play an important role in improving the well-being of individuals. Higher levels of education are associated with higher levels of well-being achievement. The findings from this analysis should make a strong case for supplementing economic indicators with other indicators of well-being.

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Notes

  1. Economic class is based on the possession of goods (bike or scooter, laptop or computer, air conditioner, small car or big car)

  2. Partial correlations between each pair of variables were inspected. Kaiser’s measure of sampling adequacy appears good (0.86).

  3. With 1,267 observations, factor loadings of 0.30 are considered significant where significance is based on 5% level of significance and standard errors assumed to be twice those of conventional correlation coefficients.

  4. Refer to Qizilbash (2002) and Dubois & Rousseau (2008) for detailed discussion on the notion of ‘vulnerability’.

  5. See for instance works of Lelli (2001) and Chiappero- Martinetti (2000) to get an overview of other membership functions.

  6. Rich and poor are related to the five categories of “economic class”. Economic class 1 represents the richest group, while economic class 5 represents the poorest. Instead of using income, consumption or expenditure information to reflect household wealth, asset-based measure is used because it reflects longer-run household wealth or living standards and is not affected by short-run interruptions and shocks (McKenzie, 2005; Vyas and Kumaranayake, 2006).

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Acknowledgments

I am deeply thankful to Professor Kanchan Chopra for her very insightful and inspiring suggestions on many drafts of this manuscript. I thank the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi for all the support extended during the course of this study. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support extended by SIDA (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency) and the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC). I also thank Shashi Bhushan for assisting me in the field work.

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  1. Global Change Programme, Jadavpur University, 88, Raja, S.C. Mallick Road, Kolkata, 700032, West Bengal, India

    Preeti Kapuria

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Correspondence to Preeti Kapuria.

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Kapuria, P. A Human Well-Being Perspective to the Measurement of Quality of Life: Findings From the City of Delhi. Applied Research Quality Life 11, 125–145 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-014-9358-7

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