India fares poorly on UN goals

JYOTI MALHOTRA

New Delhi, July 2, 2007 : The heads of a handful of UN and UN-affiliated organizations at the press conference simply did not address the question as to why India was lagging so badly behind UN targets on health, maternal and child mortality, so it was left to Planning Commission’s Syeda Hameed to provide the answers.

``It is the issue of governance, a question of leakages. By the time the rupee from Delhi reaches the villages, how does it become 20 paisa. But in India, we have never looked at outcomes before,’’ Hameed said.

Speaking at the South Asian launch of a midpoint progress report on the UN’s millennium development goals, Hameed welcomed India’s booming trade and investment indices, but warned that the poverty divide was actually getting larger and larger.

``Poverty may have come down, but the trickle-down effect is simply not taking place,’’ she said, adding, ``we’re spending a lot of money, but systems are simply not kicking in. The problem is not that we don’t have resources, but it is the inability of these resources to reach the poorest sections of the people.’’

India seems to have somewhat improved performance in the eight target areas, compared to when the goals were adopted in 2000. But according to the UN, ``progress is still unacceptably slow’’ in key areas such as child malnutrition.

For eg, one out of six Indian women still die in childbirth (25 per cent of the world total), India has one-fifth of the world’s diseases, and the largest HIV-AIDS cases in the world.
A major challenge is sanitation, with 60 per cent of the population having no access to toilet facilities.

The story gets grimmer, says the UN. Malnutrition statistics in women and children are worse in South Asia than sub-Saharan Africa. As many as 35 million Indian children have never seen the inside of a school, 46 per cent under 3 years of age are underweight and as many as 74/1000 still die before they are five years old.

Firoza Mehrotra of UNIFEM said there was only one way to break the impasse : Follow the money, find out where it has been spent.

None of the UN heads present on the occasion wanted to say so, but clearly, India’s performance will determine how the rest of Asia fares by the time the goals reach their 2015 deadline. Bangladesh’s astounding performance on cracking down on maternal and child mortality was also cited in comparison.
ENDS