What do you understand by ‘people as a resource’?

People can make the best use of nature to create more resources when they have the knowledge, skill and technology to do so. This is why human beings are considered a resource. It is the abilities of human beings which help in transferring a physical material into a valuable resource.

‘People as a resource’ is a way of referring to a country’s working people in terms of their existing productive skills and abilities. The idea of people as a resource is linked to the concept of human capital—i.e., the stock of skill and productive knowledge embodied in a population. Any production of goods and services requires the presence of the four factors of production, namely land, labour, physical capital and human capital. The knowledge and enterprise provided by the human capital puts together the other three factors to produce an output. Population becomes an asset instead of a liability when investments are made in the form of education, training and medical care.