Rising food prices and growing unemployment across South Asia has created a crisis situation where India is unlikely to meet the 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDG) for poverty alleviation.
The United Nations annual MDG report, aimed to act as a wake-up call for nations, raises a question mark about whether India can slash poverty levels from 51 per cent in 1990 to 24 per cent in 2015 given that it is making extremely poor progress in most of its social indicators.
Food prices spiked in 2008 but incomes fell due to financial crisis. This has created a situation where the FAO estimates that the number of under-nourished exceeded one billion in 2009. A large percentage of these under-nourished live in India where high food prices and low employment levels have left the poor with much less to eat. Under-nutrition among children under five continues to be widely prevalent due to lack of food, inadequate water and health services.
And amongst these children also, children in rural areas and poorer households are more likely to be underweight than those living in cities or in higher socio-economic groups.
The financial crisis of 2008 forced people into streams of vulnerable employment where they are either working on their own or as unpaid family workers surviving on less than $ 1.25 dollars per day. The ILO has estimated the global vulnerable employment rate in 2009 to be 53 per cent which translates into 1.6 billion people working in substandard conditions and meagre wages. Not all the indicators are so alarming, enrolment in primary education has risen to 89 per cent in the developing world with levels of school dropouts on the decline.