The concept of "human development" arose in the late 1980s as a cor ollary of the emerging consensus that the definition of development had to put human beings at the epicentre of any development process.

The first Global Human Development Report (GHDR) in 1990 opened with the argument that "the true wealth of a nation is its people... the objective of development is the cr eation of an environment which allows people to benefit from a long, healthy and creative life" (UNDP, 1990: 1), and defined development as the pr ocess of enlar ging people's choices.

The concept recognised that people's choices are, in principle, disparate and unlimited. Long and healthy lives, access to knowledge in or der to r eceive and share information, and opportunities to obtain income that permits a decent life, represent some of the basic choices to which most people aspire.

The main challenge, once the concept was articulated, was to find a measuring mechanism that would cover the social dimensions r epr esenting people's choices. Clearly this exercise was complex, given that it is dif ficult, if not impossible, to try to aggregate the variety of people's choices into one, two or more indicators.

The difficulty was partially over come with the concentration on what were consider ed the thr ee main dimensions representing choices: longevity, level of education and economic income, brought together into a single synthetic index. Thus the Human Development Index (HDI) was bor n, which, as we shall see later, would come to be broken down into other indices.

Since then the concept itself has been evolving and incorporating other dimensions, including gender disparities and more inclusive measurements of poverty. Recently the concept has incorporated civic freedoms, the right to social justice, access to basic social services such as health and education, political participation and general social well-being in the analysis of development.

The concept and its instruments are in continual transformation in an effort to capture the richness and complexity of the issues being analysed as well as the broad development dimensions it intends to measure.