ABSTRACT
Post-liberalisation Indian planners are following Western economic model and considers gross domestic product (GDP) growth as a panacea for solving all the economic ills of the country. The GDP is basically a measure of a country's overall economic output - the market value of all final goods and services made within the borders of a country in a year. The GDP ignores the environment, home production for self-use and domestic work. The current economic model based on continuous economic growth with free-market ideology creates serious socio-economic problems. Consumerism is a cultural pattern that leads people to find meaning, contentment and acceptance primarily through the consumption of goods and services. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has constructed a Human Development Index (HDI), which compares country achievements across the most basic dimension of human development and takes into account literacy level, longevity and GDP adjusted to Purchasing Power Parity (PPP).
