India, China Growth Helped Poverty Eradication: IMF, WB

India and China have made a significant contribution towards eradicating poverty and hunger, say The World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Presenting its Global Monitoring Report for 2011, the WB and the IMF have said that both India and China have made significant progress on these issues.

It has predicted that both countries can achieve all of their targets in 2015, or shortly thereafter, with improved policies and faster growth.

The report, which is based on current economic projections, claims that two-thirds of the developing world is on track to reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty.

"The number of people living on less than 1.25 a day is projected to be 883 million in 2015, compared with 1.4 billion in 2005 and 1.8 billion in 1990.

Much of this progress reflects rapid growth in China and India, while many African countries are lagging behind: 17 countries are far from halving extreme poverty, even as the aggregate goals will be reached," the report says.

It says that developing countries will also achieve the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) for gender parity in primary and secondary education and for access to safe drinking water, and will be very close on hunger and on primary education completion.

However, it also reveals that some of these countries have progressed slowly in comparison to others. It says that 45 percent of these countries are short of the target on access to sanitation; 39 percent and 38 percent are far from the maternal and child mortality targets, respectively.

Source: ANI