The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): What achievements in Asia?

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) had been set by the international community led by the United Nations in a Millennium Declaration in September 2000. In order to achieve the MDGs the international community agreed that, for example, poverty will be halved by 2015 from all developing nations taking the 1990 benchmark. Together with the poverty reduction goal, the MDGs have additional seven goals. Each of these goals sets multiple targets to be achieved by 2015. Under the eight development goals there are 18 such targets to be met. The MDGs include the broad areas such as socio-economic, environment and partnership between developed and developing nations (World Bank, 2006). In this paper, an attempt has been made to investigate only the socio economic goals and their targets in some selected nations of East and South Asia. These goals cover five targets: poverty eradication, universal primary education, gender inequality, child mortality and maternal health. Although, the cut off date for achieving MDGs is 2015, yet many nations finding it major difficulties in living up to the commitments they made at the time of Millennium Declaration. There are many reasons for such a deficit however it appears that the East Asian nations are ahead compared to their counter parts in South Asia. The achievements and the non-achievements have been investigated in five countries in East and five countries in South Asia over 2000 and 2005 and the prospects to 2015.