October 15, 2006	Sunday	Ramazan 21, 1427

LAHORE: Like scores of other residents of a shanty town in Johar Town, Rani, 27, walks about one and a half kilometres each morning during summer from her ramshackle dwelling to the canal to wash clothes and take bath. As she marches to her destination with a bundle of dirty clothes in one hand and a soap bar in the other, she is tailed by a younger sister and her three malnourished, under-five boys.

Occasionally, her husband, who is always looking for some work, also accompanies the family in their daily trip. As you drive past them, you wonder as to what’s the use of washing clothes and bathing in the extremely dirty waters of the canal. But Rani’s family and others like them have no choice. The city’s polluted canal is the only source of water for them to “clean” themselves and launder their dirty linen.

Rani is one of the millions of people in Punjab who are forced to live in abject poverty, sleep hungry, forced by circumstances to keep their children out of school, and have no access to any kind of health facilities. She has no clue about the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that pledge to pull out people like her out of extreme poverty, rid them of hunger and disease, and make minimum education and health cover available to them by 2015. Nor does she in any way suspect the Punjab government doing anything to achieve the targets fixed for MDGs in the stipulated time.

“Ours is perhaps the only province which has linked its annual development spending on productive and social sectors with MDGs. Punjab has come a long way since 2003 when we prepared our provincial Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP), which covered our reforms agenda and sectoral poverty reduction strategy. We estimate that the incidence of poverty in Punjab has dropped by at least 11 per cent as against the national average of 10 per cent in the last five years as our province is a better performer than the other three smaller federating units and its economy has grown faster than the national economy,” says a senior official of the provincial Planning & Development (P&D) Department.

“If Punjab continues to grow at the current rate of around 8-9 per cent and increase its development spending, we will be able to substantially reduce the number of poor by more than half long before 2015, the deadline given under MDGs for halving incidence of poverty,” he adds.

Billions of rupees the Punjab government claims to have spent in the last four years on numerous poverty focused programmes and initiatives to reduce incidence of poverty, improve health facilities and sanitation, tackle illiteracy and end gender disparity, have made little or no difference to the lives of people like Rani, who stoically accept their conditions as their destiny.

Officials say the government’s poverty focused investments targeted at improving the productive sectors and infrastructure – agriculture, irrigation, industry, roads, etc., as well as social sectors; education, health, water supply and sanitation, etc., - have sharply been increased over the years. “The province’s annual development programme has been increased to Rs100 billion for this year from Rs20.750 billion in 2002-03. It reflects the commitment of the provincial government to achieve majority of the MDGs before 2015 through enhanced allocations for the social sector as well as infrastructure and productive sectors.”

Indeed, significant progress is being made towards meeting some of the targets fixed for MDGs in some areas. But this progress in most cases is patchy and too slow, and the quality extremely poor.

Take the example of the province’s World Bank funded education reforms programme. Though the government has successfully managed to enroll more boys and girls in primary schools than in the past, the quality of education has deteriorated. Thus the province may raise number of children going to primary schools and achieve universal enrollment by 2015, the quality of students will remain poor. Similarly, the efforts to improve social sector is feared to result in greater regional disparity, with the development gap widening between its under-developed, poor southern parts and its relatively better off, more affluent central and northern parts. This is despite the fact that the government contends that it has been investing larger amounts in South Punjab through its area-specific programmes.

The officials agree with a suggestion that the time and sufficient fiscal resources required to attain MDGs may not be available with the government and that the private sector needs to be involved as equal and positive partners in the effort to give a sense of ownership to the people. Nevertheless, the bureaucratic lethargy prevents the government to move in this direction.

On papers, the Punjab government’s claims to accomplish the targets fixed for MDGs in the stipulated time appear more than impressive. The Punjab government expects to achieve hundred per cent universal education for both boys and girls in the age group of 5-9 years by 2014-15. Most of the targets fixed for MDGs for reducing under-five mortality rate will be achieved before or by 2015. Only the target fixed for maternal mortality rate is likely not to be achieved in the stipulated time.

The targets fixed for MDGs regarding the provision of water supply and sanitation coverage to the population is also projected to be achieved in the next couple of years. Similarly, the government claims to have increased the spending and undertaken several initiatives under various specific programmes for the environment protection, elimination of gender disparity and HIV/AIDS prevention.

The quality of services offered and regional disparities notwithstanding, the provincial government may achieve the targets for MDGs by the year 2015 as stipulated by the United Nations in its Millennium Summit Declaration. But one doubts that Rani will ever be able to launder her family’s dirty clothes in the privacy of her home, which she has always dreamt of possessing one day since her girlhood, or send her malnourished boys to school.