What are the core value and objectives of development? Explain the millennium Development Goals and discuss their relevance

Three core values of development

Sustenance: The ability to meet basic needs:- All people have certain basic needs without which life would be impossible. These life-sustaining basic human needs include food, shelter, health, and protection. When any of these is absent or in critically short supply, a condition of "absolute underdevelopment" exists. A basic function of all economic activity, therefore, is to provide as many people as possible with the means of overcoming the helplessness and misery arising from a lack of food, shelter, health, and protection. To this extent, we may claim that economic development is a necessary condition for the improvement in the quality of life that is development. Without sustained and continuous economic progress at the individual as well as the societal level, the realization of human potential would not be possible. One clearly has to "have enough to be more." Rising per capita incomes, the elimination of absolute poverty, greater employment opportunities, and lessening income inequalities, therefore, constitute the necessary but not sufficient conditions for development.

Self-Esteem: To Be a Person:- A second universal component of the good life is a self-esteem-a sense of worth and self-respect, of not being used as a tool by others for their own ends. All peoples and societies seek some basic form of self-esteem, although they may call it authenticity, identity, dignity, respect, honor, or recognition. The nature and form of this self-esteem may vary from society to society and from culture to culture. However, with the proliferation of the "modernizing values" of developed nations, many societies in developing countries that have had a profound sense of their own worth suffer from serious cultural confusion when they come in contact with economically and technologically advanced societies. This is because national prosperity has become an almost universal measure of worth. Due to the significance attached to material values in developed nations, worthiness and esteem are nowadays increasingly conferred only on countries that possess economic wealth and technological power-those that have "developed."

As Denis Goulet put it, “Development is legitimized as a goal because it is an important, perhaps even an indispensable, way of gaining esteem.”

Freedom from Servitude: To Be Able to Choose:- A third and final universal value that we suggest should constitute the meaning of development is the concept of human freedom. Freedom here is to be understood in the sense of emancipation from alienating material conditions of life and from social servitude to nature, other people, misery, oppressive institutions, and dogmatic beliefs, especially that poverty is predestination. Freedom involves an expanded range of choices for societies and their members together with the minimization of external constraints in the pursuit of some social goal we call development. Amartya Sen writes of "development as freedom." W. Arthur Lewis stressed the relationship between economic growth and freedom from servitude when he concluded that "the advantage of economic growth is not that wealth increases happiness, but that it increases the range of human choice." Wealth can enable people to gain greater control over nature and the physical environment (e.g ., through the production of food, clothing, and shelter) than they would have if they remained poor. It also gives them the freedom to choose greater leisure, to have more goods and services, or to deny the importance of these material wants and choose to live a life of spiritual contemplation. The concept of human freedom also encompasses various components of political freedom, including personal security, the rule of law, freedom of expression, political participation, and equality of opportunity. Although attempts to rank countries with freedom indexes have proved highly controversial, studies do reveal that some countries that have achieved high economic growth rates or high incomes, such as China, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore, have not achieved as much on human freedom criteria.

Objectives of development

We may conclude that development is both a physical reality and a state of mind in which society has, through some combination of social, economic, and institutional processes, secured the means for obtaining a better life. Whatever the specific components of this better life, development in all societies must have at least the following three objectives:

1. To increase the availability and widen the distribution of basic life-sustaining goods such as food, shelter, health, and protection.

2. To raise levels of living, including, in addition to higher incomes, the provision of more jobs, better education, and greater attention to cultural and human values, all of which will serve not only to enhance material well-being but also to generate greater individual and national self-esteem.

 3. To expand the range of economic and social choices available to individuals and nations by freeing them from servitude and dependence, not only on other people and nation-states but also on the forces of ignorance and human misery.

                                                                 In September 2000, the 189 member countries of the United Nations at that time adopted eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), committing themselves to make substantial progress toward the eradication of poverty and achieving other human development goals by 2015. The MDGs are the strongest statement yet of the international commitment to ending global poverty. They acknowledge the multidimensional nature of development and poverty alleviation; an end to poverty requires more than just increasing the incomes of the poor. The MDGs have provided a unified focus in the development community, unlike anything that preceded them.

 

The eight goals are ambitious: to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop a global partnership for development. The goals are then assigned specific targets deemed achievable by 2015 based on the pace of past international development achievements. The goals and targets are found below the table.

Goals	Targets
1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger	Reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than $1 a day  Reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger
2.  Achieve universal primary education	Ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling
3. Promote gender equality and empower women	Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and at all levels by 2015
4. Reduce child mortality	Reduce by two-thirds the mortality rate among children under 5
5. Improve maternal health	Reduce by three-quarters the maternal mortality ratio
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases	Halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS Halt and begin to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability	Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs; reverse the loss of environmental resources  Reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water Achieve significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020
8. Develop a global partnership for the development	Develop further an open, rule-based, predictable, nondiscriminatory trading and financial system; that includes a commitment to good governance, development, and poverty reduction—both nationally and internationally  Address the special needs of the least developed countries; includes tariff and quota-free access for least developed countries' exports; enhanced program of debt relief for heavily indebted poor countries (HIPCs) and cancellation of official bilateral debt; and more generous official development assistance (ODA) for countries committed to poverty reduction  Address the special needs of landlocked countries and small-island developing states  Deal comprehensively with the debt problems of developing countries through national and international measures to make debt sustainable in the long term  In cooperation with developing countries, develop and implement strategies for decent and productive work for youth  In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable essential drugs in developing countries  In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications