Tracking of Millennium Development Goals by Districts in India

Barsharani Maharana, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS)

This paper aims to track the Millennium Development Goals by districts in India using District Level Household and Facility Survey-3 data. The findings reveal that more than half of the districts are still underneath stern poverty; the districts will very soon achieve universal primary education; primary education has overcome gender disparity in all the districts, but gender disparity in secondary education still exists in most of the districts; coverage of measles vaccination in all the districts is improving; in more than half of the districts occurrence of institutional births is very less; knowledge of HIV/AIDS is wide spread among women on the contrary low condom use among men is a matter of concern to combat HIV/AIDS, ensuring environmental sustainability in all the districts is a challenging task for India. Achieving the MDGs is a critical challenge for India and it has just 5 years to translate the goals into reality.