NEW YORK: Scores of nations have lifted themselves out of poverty and illiteracy, but those signs of broad progress hide crippling inequality and suffering by millions of people left behind, a United Nations agency said on Tuesday.

One in three people is malnourished, more than one in ten lives in extreme poverty and roughly the same number can neither read nor write, said the Human Development Report issued by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

At the same time, the world’s richest 1 per cent hold nearly half the world’s wealth, it said.

Progress must be universal, said UNDP, an agency that works to eradicate poverty and inequality.

“People now live longer, more children are in school and more people have access to basic social services,” the report said.

“Yet human development has been uneven, and human deprivations persist. Progress has bypassed groups, communities, societies — and people have been left out.” Measuring nations in terms of life expectancy, levels of education and standard of living, the UNDP report used a so-called Human Development Index (HDI) and compared its 2015 results with those it collected in its first report in 1990.

Every developing nation improved over those 25 years, it said.

The number of countries ranking high on the index rose to 51 from 11 and the number at the low end fell to 41 from 62. But strip away national boundaries, and a third of the world’s population ranks low on that scale, it said.

Published in Dawn, March 22nd, 2017