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Revisiting the MDG’s: Exploring a Multidimensional Framework for Human
Development
seen to capture a diluted picture of cultural differences,
economic unevenness, entitlement-deficits, access
disparities, and freedom variations; and on the other, a
disjointed incoherence within various goals is perceived as
restraining the correspondence of the achievements of one
goal with the accomplishment of the other. Why this
happens and how this permeates through the various targets
and indicators of the MDG regime is purported to be
addressed by this article. To underscore the validity of what
is argued, it is also shown that how the development
paradigm contained in the capabilities approach (CA) of
Nobel Laureate Amartya Kumar Sen provides a more
plausible alternative by taking proper cognizance of these
limitations.
The case of aggregated generalization is illustrated by a
simple example. Take the first target of MDG’s first goal
which aims at a reduction in acute poverty by half (on the
scale of a Dollar a day). By this target, given a Million people
living below the Dollar a day line, scaling up half a Million
above the line suffices in proclaiming the achievement of the
goal. But what if half of this Million were already living on
above 95 cents a day and the other half on five cents or less?
Won’t taking away the last five cents from the bottom half
and bestowing it on those living on 95 cents or more
accomplish the target for the goal?
No doubt this is a case of extreme hypothecation, but it does
raise concerns about the sufficiency of the MDG’s framework
to cater to such, howsoever atypical, eventualities. And
howbeit, the example highlights the partial-factuality
inherent in an aggregated approach, induced by the want of
concern for distributional inequity. The MDG’s contrivances
of poverty gap ratio and share of poorest quintile in national
income are inadequate instruments to address this quandary
mainly because distributional imbalances are seldom
captured by the mathematical tools of rates, ratios and
percentages. Greater context-specificity and deeper
informational comprehensiveness is needed to guard against
such instrumental abstractions.
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