Poverty fight on but slow

South Asia, including India, will not be able to eradicate poverty or provide primary education to all by 2015, says a new poverty index to be released next week in Delhi.

Updated on: Feb 22, 2010, 24:14:17 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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South Asia, including India, will not be able to eradicate poverty or provide primary education to all by 2015, says a new poverty index to be released next week in Delhi.

The Basic Capabilities Index (BCI), 2009 has found that South Asia will get 80 points on the index by 2015, 10 points higher than the present value of 70. India received 68 points in the index, an increase of meagre four points since 2004.

The global NGO Social Watch’s index of 130 countries says 100 points defines well-being of the citizens based on children getting education till primary level, child mortality rate and percentage of births attended by skilled labourers. The BCI does not use income as an indicator.

“The index shows that despite our (India’s) economic growth, we are still way behind on providing basic amenities to people,” said Amitabh Jha, of Social Watch-India, a conglomeration of civil society groups in India.

Working on similar well-being criteria, the Suresh Tendulkar committee in December said 38 per cent of Indians are poor. The index to be released on Monday agrees that providing basic facilities to all, as said in millennium development goals, is still a challenge for India.

The index, however, said that south Asia, a region with worst BCI in 2004, has been making fast progress, but the situation is still “extremely critical”.

Since 2004, the report said, one-third of the countries failed to raise their BCI value by more than one per cent and only one out of six countries showed significant progress.

“Most of the countries in the world are very far from achieving the social objectives committee to for 2015,” said Roberto Bissio, coordinator of Social Watch secretariat.

The index also tells about the increasing gap in living standards of rich and poor in the world. The highest BCI is 97 of Iran and lowest is 44 of Chad in Africa, followed by Afghanistan, Ethopia, Bangladesh and Nepal.

“There is an enormous gap in living conditions between the nations with highest average BCI (north America) and regions with worst (Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia),” the report said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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