As the world's largest democracy, and also the country with the largest population of poor, India's case is critical to the success of the UN's Millennium Development Goals, Director of the UN's Millennium Campaign Salil Shetty said.
"The MDGs set a benchmark and a set of shared responsibilities and India's case is make or break," Shetty warned, "The picture is not looking good now."
Shetty was speaking at the first ever AIF-UN Summit-- a collaborative effort between the American India Foundation and the UN Foundation-- held on September 19 in New York to discuss development in India and to showcase the AIF's education and livelihood programs and partners in India, among them the League of Artisans founded by Chandrika Tandon, the Bodh Shikhsha Samiti in Jaipur run by Yogendra Upadhyay and Janarth in Aurangabad run by Pravin Mahajan.
Joining Shetty in his words of caution was Charles MacCormack, President of Save The Children, who said the 'jury was still out on India' on the question of whether India could meet the MDGs by their stated deadline, 2015.
"More than half the world's poor live in India and the MDGs' success depends on India," he said.
Shetty said that while the Indian economy has been doing well growing GDP at about 6 percent, the core issue if inequality and distribution remained, pointing out that a quarter of the world's out of school remained in India and were concentrated in poor and populous states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh.
However, both Shetty and Professor Arjun Appadurai, Provost of the New School University in New York, said that the Indian American community, with its investment interests, is in a position to influence lawmakers in both countries to work towards meeting the MDGs.
"The Indian American community can be worked into the master plan for the region," Appadurai said.
MacCormack also said the power of the community for change in the mother country was substantial, citing the example of Spain and southern Europe, as well as Ireland. "The Spanish people, in the 1960s were living in 14th century conditions," he said. "But a lot of them went north for jobs, and then came back and invested both money and ideas."
Rajat Gupta, co-chair of the AIF and worldwide partner in McKinsey and Company, however, reminded everyone that the endeavor was not for any one sector alone.
"No sector of society, not government, not the private sector, not civil society, can achieve the MDGs alone," he said.
"We need real collaboration between sectors."
In his keynote address to the Summit, Robert Kerrey, president of the New School and former governor of and senator from Nebraska, said that the MDGs should not be relegated to the win-lose game. Instead, he said, another issue needed to be addressed for poverty eradication. "We have to fight another issue to end poverty and that is migration," he said, saying that too many people moving to urban areas for survival caused political instability. At the same time, he castigated US lawmakers on the grounds that '(you) cannot oppose the movement of jobs to India while opposing immigration to the US'.
