India has cut poverty by half, but progress is uneven: UN

As the deadline for achieving the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) draws to a close in September, a UN report has commended India for reducing poverty by half (from 45.3 per cent to 21.9 per cent till 2011-12).

This was attributed to economic growth as well as higher social spending on interventions such as MGNREGA (rural job guarantee scheme) and the National Rural Health Mission. However, it pointed out that this progress was “uneven.”

“Over 270 million Indians in 2012 still remain trapped in extreme poverty (living less than $1.25/day) making the post-2015 goal of eliminating extreme poverty by 2030 challenging, but feasible,” said ‘The MDG report 2015’, released here on Tuesday by NITI Aayog member Bibek Debroy. The report is the last in the series of MDG reports till new goals are set by the UN General Assembly in September.

According to the report, India made “notable progress” towards reaching the MDGs, but is still home to “one quarter of the world’s under-nourished population, over a third of the world’s underweight children and nearly a third of the world’s food-insecure people.”

Calling for policy correction to correct growing disparities, it said “the incidence of poverty in rural India is twice that of urban areas, and higher among excluded groups –Scheduled Tribes, Scheduled castes, female-headed households, and religious minorities, such as Muslims.”

At a time when the NDA government is under fire from the Opposition for cutting social sector allocations by half, the UN report calls for widening of poverty alleviation schemes, such as MGNREGA and food security in poorer States, improvements in the Integrated Child Development Services and Public Distribution System and speedy execution of the National Food Security Act, among others.

On the positive side, the report said that apart from the goal of reducing poverty, India has also made progress in achieving gender parity in primary school enrolment, reversing the spread of diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis and has eradicated polio. Notably, India has also halved the proportion of population without access to clean drinking water.

However, reducing child and infant mortality (49 and 40 per 1,000 live births), improving maternal health (167 per 100,000 live births) access to sanitation (54.6 per cent), enrolment in primary education, environmental challenges and greater political participation by women are some “lagging indicators” where more effort will be required, it said, adding that “the goal of sustainable development cannot be achieved globally without India.”