LONDON: South Asia holds the “swing vote” whether the Millennium Development Goals can be reached by 2015, according to UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch Brown.

“South Asia has 40 per cent of the problem, which it means it has 40 per cent of the solution,” he said at the launch of the Human Development Report 2003 of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in London on Monday.

South Asia has a special place partly because of its sheer size, Malloch Brown said. It is the place where 40 per cent of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, and where 35 per cent of children do not get proper primary education. “So this region is most going to drive whether we reach the targets or not,” he said.

But South Asia does not matter only because it has a large share of the problem. It is critical because of the nature of solutions it has to offer.

“India has been graduating from receiving assistance, and is on track to itself becoming a donor,” he said. “If India reaches the targets it will be through its domestic resources. Whether Africa reaches those targets is mostly in the hands of Western aid donors. But whether South Asia can reach those targets is in the hand of South Asia, and whether the best policies prevail or not.”

Aid flows into South Asia are “relatively insignificant”, Malloch Brown said. “It is the quality of decision-making by government officials and the private sector that will make the critical difference.”

If the West can play a role, he said, it will be through facilitating “improved trade access to world markets, rather than through development assistance.”

“I am a great admirer of the Indian model,” he said. “They are standing on their own feet, not holding out their hands for dollars or euros.”

So far the responses of several of the states in India have been robust because democracy is strong, Malloch Brown said. “If a state like Madhya Pradesh gets a bad number on some count, it responds, it wants to improve, because it is a market-based democracy, and the elected officials will have to go back to the people.”

If Madhya Pradesh has been low on some counts in its progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, this has something to do with the size of administrative units, he said. Malloch Brown spoke of the improved administration of Uttaranchal state carved out of Uttar Pradesh.

Organizations like the UNDP, he said, can never try to create programmes “for” India but can only work “with” India “because they are very prickly on these issues.”

Malloch Brown said the progress in Pakistan would have to be monitored in the context of under-reporting. “There is not enough data to categorize Pakistan on many of these issues,” he said.

In Pakistan progress is “a critical governance challenge,” he said. Several programmes are stuck behind the political system, and much will depend on whether it becomes “effective enough to decentralize.”

Lead author of the UNDP report Sakiko Fukuda-Parr said the situation in South Asia is improving rapidly in many fields, particularly in improving water supply and in battling poverty. Countries such as India and China are developing very rapidly towards meeting many of the goals, she said, while some other countries are showing a decline.

The human development index has fallen in 21 countries around the world, she said, though no South Asian country has shown a decline.

“What you are seeing today is a sort of ‘Third World A and a Third World B’,” she said. “South Asia is doing very well, but in some areas it is going badly,” she said, pointing to certain projections that the incidence of HIV/AIDS in India could rise very rapidly.

“Hunger has been reduced in South Asia, but 43 per cent of the world’s hungry are still in South Asia,” she said. “And it still has a very large number of the undernourished.” she said.

“Most South Asian countries have made huge strides in food production but a problem remains for lack of effective distribution,” she said. “But we have seen an effective response to that in Sri Lanka.” —Dawn/The InterPress News Service.