Bridge implementation gaps to achieve MDGs

Ahead of the MDG Review Summit to be held on September 20-22, Nisha Agrawal, CEO, Oxfam India, talks about the state of MDGs in India and calls for an efficient integration of efforts by government, private players and NGOs to achieve the goals.

India for the first time has actually produced a monitoring report on the MDGs that is going to be presented at the upcoming meeting in September at the UN General Assembly, and we had expected that the Prime Minister would be leading the delegation, so we went to talk to him about some of the issues.

There were two kinds of issues; one was on process; to say that there should have been wider consultation with civil society on the interpretation of some of the data that was being presented in the report. Secondly, that in many countries civil society members go as part of the official delegation to the UN and we requested him to take some members of civil society along. So that was on process, on substance we had a list of issues that we presented to him, saying what kinds of policies we think should be enacted in India that would lead to a truly inclusive development path.

One of them of course is where poor people get their livelihoods from, so it was about access and control over natural resources, it was about agriculture and replicating the success of the green revolution in Eastern India.

Then very specifically on each of the MDGs; on education, of course we have a wonderful Right to Education law; how to enact it, so that it truly becomes a reality on the ground; on healthcare, we don’t have such a Right to Health law, so we are lobbying for that, it would be very good to enshrine basic healthcare as a right.

Then on women’s empowerment, which we believe is the underlying cross-cutting issue for attaining MDGs in India and elsewhere; to get the passage of the Women’s Reservation Bill as a sign of commitment right at the top on women empowerment. These were some of the issues that we presented to him.

Excerpt of an interview with OneWorld South Asia