With India >not on track on several of the Millennium Development Goals targets ahead of the 2015 deadline, The Hindu spoke to experts on the reasons why we are lagging behind and the challenge of monitoring India’s progress on global development indicators.
Despite India’s excellent economic growth figures, there has been little corresponding impact on its social indicators, former Secretary, Planning Commission, N.C. Saxena, points out. For this, he blames the design flaw of several of India’s social sector programmes. Major food-related programmes, such as the Public Distribution System and Integrated Child Development Services are plagued with corruption, leakages, errors in selection, and little accountability, he says. These programmes also discriminate against and exclude those who need them the most -- poor urban migrants, street and slum residents, dispersed hamlets, and unorganised workers such as hawkers.
Venkatesh Srinivasan, Assistant Representative of the UN Population Fund, told The Hindu that India’s maternal mortality reduction targets remain unmet because for a long time the Indian State was only concerned with family planning, and obstetrics care came into focus only after 2005 when the Janani Suraksha Yojana, with its conditional cash transfer programmes, was introduced.
“In the 160 districts identified where MMR is high, the quality of obstetrics care at the level of community hospitals continues to be poor. Capacities in local hospitals must be strengthened to make progress,” he says.
Data deficit
Mr. Saxena notes with concern how State governments actively fudged data, which renders the monitoring of progress on development indicators ineffective and accountability meaningless. While objective evaluations show that 43.5 per cent children are underweight, of which 17 per cent are severely malnourished, State governments only report 13 per cent children as underweight, and 0.4 per cent as severely malnourished, as per the India Human Development Report, 2011. “One District Collector, when confronted with this kind of bogus figures, told me that reporting correct data is “a high-risk and low-reward activity,” he says.
Sachin Chaturvedi, Director-General, Research and Information Systems for Developing Countries, told The Hindu that the inconsistency in government data gathering on its social and development indicators poses a huge challenge not only for reporting progress on the MDGs, which expire this year, but also the Sustainable Development Goals that will be adopted later this month at the UN General Assembly session, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi will attend.
“With the new data addition on issues like inequality in SDG, the Indian data system may not be equipped to capture most important dimensions of it,” Mr. Chaturvedi says. “On child deaths, while the official report shows India reaching close to the target, a recent Lancet Report shows that India is still at 49 deaths out of 1000, while the target was of 42,” he notes.
Bharat Ramaswamy of the Indian Statistical Institute told The Hindu that collection of data on under nutrition had to improve to monitor progress on tackling hunger, where India fares poorly. “The NFHS, which collects malnourishment data, is not owned by the government and many of the time, there is dependency on ad hoc surveys like the Rapid Survey of Children (RSOC) to generate policy insights. Children must command more state attention,” he says.
But the political discretion in engaging in such data gathering is enormous, he points out, and the decision whether to release such data or not is trapped in the politics of data.
