Millennium Development Goals: regional perspectives - India

India is a vast country of over one billion people. It is multilingual, multiethnic and multicultural. With advances in higher education, information technology and the knowledge industry, India has aspirations to be a developed nation by the year 2020. This will be possible, however, only if economic progress is coupled with significant improvements in the field of healthcare. As figures 1-3 illustrate, 1 the performance of India in reaching the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is best described as mixed: 'moderately on track' for MDG 4 but unequivocally 'slow or off track' for MDG 5. There are a number of complex inter-related reasons for the slower progress in India.