'Leaving social sec in pvt hand not wise for India'

New Delhi, Jan 26: US economist and Director of the UN Millennium project Jeffrey Sachs, ranked by the Time magazine among the most influential figures of the world, believes it would not be wise for India to leave social the sector in private hands.

Developing countries cannot bridge the rich-poor divide and achieve millennium development goals with the government withdrawing from areas like education and health, Dr Sachs told UNI.

He was here this week to take part in the Seventh Delhi Sustainable Summit.

''We generally think of the private sector as a solution for everything and unjustly compare it with the underfunded public sector in developing countries,'' said Dr Sachs.

He pointed out the success of the UK public health service to bolster his point that given sufficient funds, public sector can play a vital role in ensuring equitible distribution of the fruits of development.

DR Sachs also cited the case of Latin American countries where the rich-poor divide widened after the government withdrew from the social sector.

The US economist felt that many of the UN Millennium Development Goals(MDGs) in poor countries could be achieved if the developed countries cut down their military expenditure. For example, he said his country spent 600 billion dollars on defence but gave only 400 million dollar to Africa as aid.

Dr Sachs is currently a professor and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also known for his work with international agencies on problems of poverty reduction, debt cancellation, and disease control especially HIV/AIDS, for the developing world.

Besides public spending, adoption of more efficient and clean technologies is a must for India to fulfill the basic needs of its people in a sustainable way, he added.

In the coming years, the governments will have to scale up public interventions to adequately feed their poor and improve the health of millions of their children, he stressed.

He also advised India to increase its spending on protection of environment, which was must to make its development sustainable.

He said it was good to see India and other countries catching up with development, but they were failing when it came to environment.

In Dr Sachs' view, the Green Revolution was caused by increase in irrigation facility. But it was done by tapping of the underground water, which was an unsustainable way of irrigation, he added.

Calling the Green Revolution of the 1960s a borewell revolution, he said the country will have to face main challenge to its development from water stress which was going to be exacerbated in the future due to global warming, which was causing melting of snow in the Himalayan hydrological system. Replying to a question, Dr Sachs said climate change was going to have more severe impact on countries like India by affecting crop yield and causing floods and droughts and putting its hydrological system under stress.

He advised India to work on a war footing to adopt cleaner technologies to cut down the emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

Dr Sachs was strongly for Carbon Capture and Storage(CCS) technology for power plants based on fossil fuels in which carbon emissions are not allowed into the atmosphere but trapped underground.

India will continue to depend heavily on fossil fuels like coal for the next 20 to 25 years, so it has to seriously think of adopting such technologies. He, however, added that the carbon trapping technology was yet to be put to practical use and there was no pilot project yet which could be taken as a model.

In this connection, he said developing countries like India and China were not going to escape from the responsibility of cutting down greenhouse emissions in the treaty that would replace Kyoto Protocol, which is going to end in 2012. In the existing protocol, only the developed nations, who have been historically responsible for causing these emissions, have the onus to cut them down.

Dr Sachs said the Delhi Sustainable Summit was an excellent forum for exchange of views on the most critical issue of sustainability.

The Summit was organised on the theme of 'Meeting the MDGs: Exploring the Natural Resource Dimension.' It explored what mechanisms can be designed for leveraging natural resources towards poverty alleviation in sustainable manner and whether natural resource degradation was threatening to offset other initiative aimed at poverty alleviation.

UNI