MDGs and Govt
Kabir Swarup
| Civil society must ensure MDGs are on govt's agenda: development experts |
|
Where does India stand in relation to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set by the United Nations for sustainable development worldwide? |
|
At a seminar organised by the United Nations in New Delhi, development experts stressed that Indian civil society needs to take up issues related to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) with the government. Economist A K Shiv Kumar emphasised the role of non-government organisations (NGOs) in drumming up awareness and support for the MDGs. He said: "The UN is afraid of talking about the MDGs as many countries do not feel comfortable discussing these issues. It therefore becomes the responsibility of civil society to take up the MDGs with the government." Experts, economists and development practitioners discussed the role of civil society in achieving the MDGs, formulated and adopted by the United Nations at the Millennium Summit in September 2000. World leaders decided to set targets for achieving progress in eight areas of development -- poverty and hunger, primary education, women's equality, child mortality, maternal health, disease control, the environment and global partnerships for development -- by 2015. Kumar stressed that the country would have to first acknowledge the goals to be able to implement them. He said: "The challenge before civil society is to make the government accept the MDGs. Many countries have gone beyond the MDGs; Thailand has now announced MDG+. This is the way to go." He added that implementation of the MDGs had to be sorted out. "Questions of resources or resource allocation are not economic but political. Unless there is political will, the country will not be able to move ahead on the MDGs." The seminar also involved an assessment of India's progress, or lack thereof, on the various MDGs. Pronab Sen, director, Planning Commission of India, highlighted the country's efforts in working on the MDGs. He explained that as the MDGs were more about social transformation than development indicators or targets, providing deadlines might not work. He also noted that although India had begun work on achieving the MDGs before many other countries had, it did not feel the need to fully adopt the MDGs, as they had to be adapted to local conditions. On goals relating to education, Sen said that keeping children in schools was an important issue. "We have to think of an alternative strategy apart from the mid-day meal scheme, which has been successful in retaining children in schools. The Supreme Court has got into the act and we have to see what will happen." He believes the problem of poverty does not pose a major challenge and that India should be able to achieve the MDG on hunger and poverty (which aims to halve the number of people living in extreme poverty and hunger by 2015) by 2010. However he warned, "On hunger, there is a tremendous lack of clarity because we have a long way to go in solving undernourishment and malnourishment, particularly among marginalised communities." Sen was also critical of the progress made on maternal mortality and water access-related goals. "We have not moved an inch in the last 10 years on maternal mortality. It is not clear whether it is the nature of the intervention or the institutions that are not working properly. The debate is still on. If the intervention is not working it can be changed and improved. But if the institutions are not working then it is cause for worry as institutional changes are difficult and take time." On water, he said: "Water is the single most important problem -- not merely quality of water but also its availability. In many areas where water was not a problem, now people find it difficult to irrigate their fields and the groundwater level has gone down drastically." On the goals for environment conservation, Sen said the country had long been working on certain MDG indicators like increasing forest cover and was likely to achieve the stipulated percentage of green cover before the MDG deadline. According to Shalini Dewan, director of the UN Information Centre, Delhi, in a mere four years the MDGs had transformed the development face of the world. With the exponential growth of the civil society sector in India, the UN now plans to increase its involvement with NGOs in the country. For more on the Millennium Development Goals click here Source: www.oneworld.sa, September 14, 2004 |