Top-down problems

Ten years ago,the largest ever group of world leaders assembled in New York at what was called the Millennium Summit. The agenda was ambitiously open-ended: to determine the role of the UN in the 21st century. That needed narrowing down,and then-Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was one of those who called for a fresh global initiative to fight poverty. This resulted in what came to be called the Millennium Development Goals. The MDGs were supposed to focus global energy on reducing extreme poverty and deprivation; but to demonstrate that they were a break from a past which had privileged noble,hand-waving speechifying instead of accountability,the goals would be accompanied by measurable target indicators.

Two-thirds of the way in,another summit has been called,to examine how weve done so far. Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna will presumably praise what Indias growth has done for poverty here. And the summit in general will,no doubt,call for more targeted investment,and send out a reminder that the siphoning off of social-sector funds is the biggest hurdle for successfully meeting MDG targets. Which raises the questions that seriously need addressing: what have the MDGs done to spur Indias own governance structures? And what can India suggest or commit,to the world and to its own people,about easing the constraints on the development process?

In spite of Indias growth,and the social sector-centric approach of the UPA government,the ministry of statistics and programme implementations recent report on Indias progress about the MDGs makes for less-than-optimistic reading. India could conceivably make the major goal halving the number of people that live on a dollar a day as compared to 1990 but only if low-performing heartland states get their act together. Much else is worrying: progress on gender-related indices is particularly problematic. Buried in that is one major lesson: that,even with targeted,outcome-oriented policies,theres no getting away from the stranglehold that regressive power structures or local political corruption have on the last step of the development process. The MDGs,as befits a set of targets dreamed up by world leaders in New York,are a top-down set of ideas,as top-down as the Central social-sector schemes that followed them. Indias lessons suggest the crucial twists the last lap of the MDG race require bottom-up implementation,accountability and transparency mechanisms. Thats a case we will hopefully hear made in New York.