India has a long way to go

Poverty has declined marginally in India, but the country shares the top position with Afghanistan for the largest number of hungry and malnourished people, and also for the largest number of children dying in infancy, in the Asia-Pacific region, indicating the poor health and nutrition status in Asia’s third-largest economy.

India’s failure to remove hunger, the first of the eight millennium development goals (MDGs), and the unlikelihood of achieving it by 2015, was indicated today by an assessment of regional progress towards the MDGs.

The report “Accelerating equitable achievement of the MDGs: Closing the gaps in health and nutrition in Asia and the Pacific” was jointly published by the United Nations Development Programme, the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and the Asian Development Bank.

The report warned at the present rate of progress, the region as a whole was unlikely to meet MDGs related to eradicating hunger, reducing child mortality and improving maternal health, among others.

Rural development minister Jairam Ramesh said improvement in the health profile of the poor could happen only with access to improved sanitation and safe drinking water. “Both funding and management in water supply and sanitation is something very much on the cards. In the next couple of months, we will see more and more evidence of changes in these areas,” he said.

The report suggested preparations for the second phase of MDGs, subsequent to the target year 2015, as it believes the present goals are unlikely to be achieved in the matter of hunger, water supply, infant survival and underweight babies in many countries, including India.

The region has reached the MDG of halving the incidence of poverty, reducing the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 per day from 50 to 22 per cent between 1990 and 2009, according to the report.

The region has also achieved some other MDG indicators ahead of the target year 2015, including promoting gender equality in education, reducing HIV prevalence and stopping the spread of tuberculosis, increasing forest cover, reducing consumption of ozone depleting substances and halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water.