India made significant progress in poverty reduction: UN
India made significant progress in poverty reduction: UN
A UN report says India has made significant progress in poverty reduction and the number of poor people in the country is expected to half of the 1990 level by 2015.
According to the 2010 report of the United Nations on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), While India is expected to reduce its poverty rate from 51 per cent in 1990 to 24 per cent in 2015, reducing its number of extremely poor by 188 million. The report said, India has also contributed to the large reduction in global poverty.
But the rest of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are falling behind in meeting the target of reducing poverty by half by 2015.
The overall poverty rate is expected to fall to 15 per cent by 2015, which translates into around 920 million people living under international poverty line- half the number in 1990.
Poverty rates in China are also expected to fall by 5 per cent.
But the report highlights that financial crisis brought on by the developed world has negatively impacted growth in developing countries and will leave an additional 64 million people in extreme poverty by the end of 2010.
The report said, it is clear the improvements in the lives of the poor have been unacceptably slow and some hard won gains are being eroded by the climate food and economic crises. The report also indicated progress on tree plantation in India.
On the issue of environmental sustainability, the UN found that the world has already missed the 2010 deadline for biodiversity conservation with potentially grave consequences and the number of species facing extinction is growing by the day especially in developing countries.
While South America and Africa continue to show the largest net losses of forests, the report said that Asia had registered a net gain of some 2.2 million hectares annually in the last decade, mainly because of large-scale afforestation programmes in China, India and Vietnam.
The report said, these three countries have expanded their forest area by a total of nearly 4 million hectares annually in the last five years. The report also found that during the last decade, expanded activity in agriculture and manufacturing had led to the pollution of surface and ground water.
Water contamination with naturally occurring inorganic arsenic and fluoride have affected the safety of water supplies in India, China and Bangladesh.
