Buoyed by rapid economic growth, while Asia has made dramatic progress in the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, almost 30 per cent of the population in South Asia is still living on a dollar a day, a UN report said.
The Millennium Development Goal Report, 2007 comes at the midpoint of a 15-year effort to implement a set of eight key development objectives including eradicating poverty and hunger, universalisation of education, ensuring gender justice and improving maternal and child health and nutrition. The goals are supposed to be reached by 2015 across the globe.
It said while Asia has made progress in eradication of poverty, there is evidence that the benefits of economic growth were not being shared across different parts of the continent.
Referring to the Indian situation, Planning Commission member Syeda Hamid said women and child nutrition and food security in south Asia in general and India in particular was worse than sub-Saharan Africa. “Prevalence of malnutrition among children came down marginally from 53 per cent in the 1990 to 46 per cent in 2005,” she said.
Appreciating India’s average growth rate of 7.7 per cent for the last three years, she said the fruits of development had not percolated down to the marginalized sections of the country.
“Basic amenities like drinking water and sanitation are yet to reach the poor. While India is emerging a global economic leader we should keep in mind that it has the highest rate of child mortality and has the second largest HIV/AIDS infected people in the world,” Hamid said.
Maintaining that the 11th Plan would focus on growth and development which was equitable, sustainable, inclusive and gender-just, she said the interventions should have to be evidence-based.
Stating that progress in improving child nutrition is still “unacceptably” slow, the report said if current trends continued Asia would fall short of reaching the MDG target of halving the proportion of underweight children, in large measure because of slow progress in South and South-East Asia.
