Will we achieve the MDGs?

New Delhi (Women's Feature Service) - Progress by many developing countries on reducing the number of poor could be eroded by the economic slowdown this year, which is expected to push many millions of people back into poverty. Higher food prices adversely impacts poor people who do not produce their own food - like the urban poor and landless rural poor - but for whom food accounts for a large proportion of their expenditure. A global increase in food prices means more hungry and malnourished people and an increase in the number of people in poverty.

Thus, this year's worldwide recession is going to place an extra burden on developing countries in their efforts to reduce poverty, provide food for everyone, and generally to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the target year of 2015.

This was a major theme of the recently-released Millennium Development Goals Report 2008, a mid-term assessment of regional progress on the development goals first announced in 2000. The report reflects the new global poverty data from the World Bank, which shows that globally the proportion of the extremely poor fell from 41.7 per cent to 25.7 per cent from 1990 to 2005. While India has managed to bring down its poverty levels from 52 per cent to 41 per cent in this period, the number of people in extreme poverty has risen because of poverty growth.

While much of the report's contents will not be new to our policymakers, over time rankings such as these remind us of the ground covered and, more importantly, serve as warning signals to highlight areas where the country is certainly not shining. One of the most disturbing questions that reemerges from this mid-term review is this: why is an economy that has been growing so rapidly in the past 10 years still unable to feed so many of its children?

The extent of hunger in a population can be measured by malnourishment among its children. South Asia - and India - has the largest proportion of underweight children in the world (46 per cent), but progress on tackling malnutrition has been so slow (the proportion was 54 per cent in 1990) that there seems little likelihood of Goal 1 (halving the proportion of hungry people) being met if it is the familiar business as usual approach. Against this backdrop, the challenges posed by rising global food and fuel prices, and an economic slowdown of 'uncertain duration and magnitude', mean that India will have to seriously accelerate progress if it is to meet the targets - especially on reduction of hunger and poverty.

The lethargy on reducing malnourishment appears to extend to women's health. This is another major area of neglect where, despite the ambitious central schemes such as the National Rural Health Mission and its attendant Janani Suraksha Yojana, progress has been very slow. The report sounds a dire warning on the achievability of Goal 5 (a three-quarters reduction in the maternal mortality ratio). India's maternal death rate was estimated at 450 in 2005 (301 in 2003, according to the Sample Registration System), against 50 in Eastern Asia and nine in the developed world.

There is a strong link between reducing maternal deaths and deliveries attended by skilled health workers: South Asia has the poorest record, with less than half (40 per cent) the deliveries being attended by a trained health professional. In India the proportion of such deliveries has been inching up, especially in the southern states of the country, but it still remains only 46 per cent.

Child mortality has fallen, but this is one area in which the developing world still lags far behind: a child born in a developing county is 13 times more likely to die before its fifth birthday than a child born in a developed country. India is in line with the developing country average, with 76 under-fives dying for every 1,000 live births. The fact that progress on this indicator has been so gradual indicates that the country is not on track to achieving the goal on reducing child mortality, as well.

On the positive side is India's remarkable success in improving overall access to primary education, especially for girls, a success it is well on its way to replicating in secondary education. Clearly the big thrust to primary education via the education cess and the government's flagship programmes - the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and mid-day meal scheme - is paying off as primary school enrollment reached 94 per cent in 2006, from only 72 per cent in 1991. In fact, the South Asia region has made the greatest strides among all others in improving female enrollment; in India, from 77 girls for every 100 boys enrolled in 1991 it has risen to 96 girls in 2006. Enrollment in secondary education has also improved over the same period - the ratio of girls to boys rose from 60 to 82.

In other measures of gender empowerment, Indian women have not made many gains, with their proportion of parliamentary seats remaining the same between 2000 and 2008 (nine per cent). The percentage of paid jobs held by Indian women (vis-à-vis men) is one of the lowest in the world, at only 18 per cent in 2005, against 31 per cent in Sub-Saharan Africa and 38 per cent in South-East Asia.

Environmental sanitation shows mixed progress. Most countries are on track to achieving the goal of providing improved drinking water (India has already achieved its goal, as 89 per cent of its population is covered), but the report sounds a warning that several millions of people still have no access to safe drinking water. In the area of sanitation, progress on expanding the population which has access to improved sanitation facilities has not been up to the mark (28 per cent) - despite the Total Sanitation Campaign which has been functioning since 1999. In fact, the target of 61 per cent can only be achieved by 2015 if the pace of sanitation improvement is drastically ratcheted upwards. The interlinkages between all these goals is brought out by the fact that South Asia has the largest proportion of its population still defecating in the open (around 48 per cent of the population), which brings with it an increased risk of diarrhoeal diseases, one of the main causes of childhood deaths.

While improvements in health and nutrition can be difficult to achieve, other developing countries have managed quite well. Further, these areas are so fundamental to human development that they need to be given the same big boost that primary education has received over the past 10 years, with remarkable results. So far, the global development climate has been fairly 'benign' and favourable for enabling countries to be on track with the MDGs; but the worldwide recession that has emerged could be compounded by adverse events in the years to come, which could severely impact developmental progress.

India has to make as much progress on the MDGs as it can, while the economy is still growing at a fairly decent rate despite global conditions, if it is to ever free its people from the "abject and dehumanising conditions of extreme poverty."

(Courtesy: Women's Feature Service)