Simple solutions for social goals: Sachs

NEW DELHI: India does not require miracle solutions for meeting its millennium development goals (MDG) of water, sanitation, education and health, Dr Jeffery D Sachs, special adviser to the UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, said on Monday. While addressing the Teri sustainable development summit here,he said the solutions don���t require long-term investment and are really as simple as providing a village a clinic, a school and a borewell.

The MDGs are the eight goals charted by the UN for member-states to try to achieve by 2015. The goals include hunger and poverty eradication, education and gender equality, and aim at combating child mortality, AIDS and other diseases. The UN millennium declaration of 2000 commits the UN member-states to set its own targets to achieve the goals.

For example, to achieve the goal of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, India must reduce the proportion of its people below poverty line to 18.75% by 2015 from 37.5% in 1990. As in 1999-2000, the number of people below the poverty line was 26.1%.

While highlighting the significance of achieving MDG targets, Dr Sachs pointed out that even as the country���s poverty levels in absolute numbers have declined in two decades, over 100 million of its people are still trapped in poverty. ���The solutions lie in front of us,��� he said as he stressed on the the need to put policies in action.

Differing from the environment ministry���s stand on the post-2012 Kyoto emission targets, Dr Sachs also pointed out that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions need to be fought universally and, hence, targets for India and China must be set. In the same context, he said India and China need to stop looking at themselves as developing nations keeping with their rapid industrial growth. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), China will become the largest emitter of GHGs by 2009-10.