In March 2010 when I attended a three-day global seminar organised at Harvard Law School to assess progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) at the halfway stage, 2015 seemed a long way off. At the end of the seminar, the consensus among participants, including UN agencies, government representatives and NGOs, was that progress towards the goals set for 2015 was “unsatisfactory” at the halfway stage, but that it would still be possible to reach those goals if we put in mid-course corrections. We came away from the seminar with a sense of hope.
Now that 2015 is here, some NGOs and activists are wondering whether exercises like the Harvard seminar achieve anything worthwhile, apart from a lot of paper presentations and stacks of bound reports filed away as “end products” that do not get translated into changes in ground realities.
MDGs, agreed upon by 189 countries in 2000, included reducing the number of people in poverty by 50 per cent, maternal mortality rates (MMR) by 75 per cent and infant mortality rates (IMR) by two thirds. None of these targets have been reached today, globally or in India. A report released by Oxfam during the recent World Economic Forum at Davos said that far from eliminating poverty, inequalities have in fact increased, with the share of the richest one per cent of the population actually increasing. Worldwide, 850 million people still go hungry, and 2.8 million infants under four weeks old continue to die, annually, mostly from preventable causes (lack of clean water and sanitation—halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water was one of the MDG goals). India became the second fastest growing economy during 2000-2015 but we also have 350 million Indians going hungry, and are home to one-third of the world’s malnourished children. Against the target of reducing MMR to 160 per one lakh live births by 2015, we now have 500.
Not because we are short of resources or funds—there’s money enough, thousands of crores, to erect a statue of Sardar Patel along the Narmada (“the world’s largest”—the same Narmada that has two million displaced villagers and tribals waiting for rehabilitation 20 years after being uprooted in the name of a dam for development), of Shivaji in Maharashtra, and Kempe Gowda in Karnataka. Bengaluru, which had 13,130 millionaires in 2004, saw a rise in its number of slums from 420 to 570 during the last decade. There’s money to raise MPs’ monthly pensions by 75 per cent from Rs 20,000 to Rs 35,000 but no money to obey a high court order decreeing that every government school in the country should have toilets and clean drinking water. In Karnataka, a “progressive state”, 64 per cent of the schools have no toilet despite the court order. The Karnataka government awarded Rs 25 lakh last month to a Grammy winner, but cites “lack of funds” for defaulting on paying salaries to its garbage removers.
Lack of political will to make development meaningful for the poor is the reason, not funds crunch. As African academic-activist Fantu Cheru declared at the Harvard seminar, “We need markets but we need social justice more. When financial companies have to be bailed out, governments had no trouble handing out hundreds of billions, but when it comes to health allocations, there’s never enough money.” Quite. The Indian government slashed the country’s health budget last year by Rs 6,000 crore, while Haryana and Punjab (states with high per capita incomes) saw a rise in MMR during 2003-06. India’s global rank in IMR is a dismal 134 while low-profile economies like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Vietnam fare better. Tajikstan reduced its MMR from 100 to just eight, during the decade of the MDG.
Even World Bank vice-president Otaviano Canuto said at the Harvard seminar, “The processes (of development) are as important as the outcomes.” Former president of Ireland Mary Robinson and then UN Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay, who were participants, added their voices, too, to the demand for prioritising equity along with economic growth. “It is no longer a question of whether we can afford to allocate resources for social justice,” Pillay said, “we cannot afford not to focus on social justice and egalitarian pathways.”
And still we continue to assess “progress” in terms of GDP, debating whether it is 4.9 or 6.5 per cent, juggling figures, while infants die in government hospitals due to lack of ventilators or other equipment (as in Bengaluru and Bihar last year). Even Costa Rica and Cuba do better, as Amartya Sen pointed out in The Guardian last month. GDP growth does not guarantee social transformation, not even economic transformation. Unless equity is addressed.
So, some of us wonder: What is the point in having global “seminars” if the deliberations do not get translated into better lives for the marginalised? The Rio conference, Rio+20, the Alma Ata Declaration on Health for All by 2000 (which we were signatories to), the Johannesburg World Summit for Sustainable Development—the list is long and impressive. The UN will adopt, later in 2015, a set of “sustainable development goals” (SDG) for 2016- 2030. What is the point of these armchair exercises, whatever the acronym? It will cost $250 billions just to monitor the SDG.
The answer lies not in the extent of political will that governments bring to these deliberations but in the collateral rewards that we as activists and NGOs garner—we network during and after the deliberations, exchange ideas, strategies and success stories in interactions outside the conference sessions that often prove as important as the official proceedings, and return enriched with renewed enthusiasm for getting on with our work back home. Activists in South Africa and Kenya who would normally be unable to network with Asian NGOs engaged in similar work (on slum dwellers’ rights to life and security, for instance) learn from each other. And that gives us hope. Change comes not only from governments, but also from people’s movements, however small or scattered. Gangamma from Karnataka, and Miriam from Soweto, both illiterate rustics, understood nothing of the official deliberations in English when they attended the UN Conference on Women at Beijing. That did not matter. National boundaries disappeared, as they traded strategies and took these enrichments back home.
The writer is a national award winning journalist and academic resource person specialising in gender and development. Email: sakunara@gmail.com