Keep focus on social sector: United Nations tells India

A United Nations report on Wednesday asked the government to increase focus on rights-based programmes — like the job guarantee and food security schemes — to eradicate poverty while praising PM Narendra Modi’s financial inclusion scheme, the Jan Dhan Yojana.

Updated on: Feb 5, 2015, 03:23:01 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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A United Nations report on Wednesday asked the government to increase focus on rights-based programmes — like the job guarantee and food security schemes — to eradicate poverty while praising PM Narendra Modi’s financial inclusion scheme, the Jan Dhan Yojana.

The UN report on India and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) comes at a time when the central government has cut the budget for social sector schemes and initiated a proposal to downsize the ambit of the National Food Security Act.

The government cut social sector spending by about 30% in the supplementary budget and allocation for the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act is the lowest in the last five years.

Saying that over 270 million Indians were poor despite high economic growth years, the report recommended three immediate tasks for India: widening the implementation of NREGA and the food security Act in poor states along with greater attention to rural development, universalisation of Jan Dhan Yojana, and a continued emphasis on increasing both growth and social spending.

The report also highlighted that though India was on track to reduce poverty by half based on the level in 2000, India was still home to one-fourth of the world’s poor and over one-third of underweight children.

“India should join the pledge to end hunger by 2025. Hunger responds sluggishly to growth and required complementary interventions in several areas,” the report said, adding that it will not be possible to achieve the proposed Sustainable Development Goals that replace the MDGs this year without India’s efforts.

India has made great progress on the MGDs but “being home to one-sixth of the world’s population, the world is not going to achieve the SDGs if India does not,” said Shamshad Akhtar, UN Under-Secretary-General.

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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