Targeting is not a new concept. Amartya Sen, winner of Nobel Prize for Economics, had tried to dscuss the issue of targeting in a key note address to the 1992 Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics. But what is new is targeting wrongly or rightly has gained so much ground lately amongst politicians.

Poverty means different things to different people. There is a saying from a Nepalase peasant: ?Being rich means having enough food for the whole year?. Poverty is an insult, said Mahatma Gandhi, ?Poverty stinks. It demaans, dehumanise, destroys the body and the mind? if not the soul. It is the deadliest form of violence.? And come to think of it, some well-wishers of the poor are not very fond of the word targeting.

Targeting is no doubt a very big idea, but it is an idea that doesn?t come for free. We are ready to travel the journey of targeting and equality; but at the same time we are not prepared to pay the price. Some of us will say we can?t afford it. Others will say it is not in the government program. But a few will say we can?t afford not to do it; targeting is doable and achievable. We need only political advocacy. Yes, how can we sleep in the comfort of our affluence with apathy and indifference murmuring softly in our ears.

More than 8 million people around the world die each year because they are too poor to stay alive. 8,000 childrend die of curable malaria, 7,500 young adults die of AIDS, 5,000 mothers and fathers die of tuberculosis on a daily basis in the so called world of affluence. In this fast changing and new emerging world growing according to a new game, insulor Mauritius is not immune to the affront of poverty.

The Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance has said loudly at Belle Mare: ?We know who and where are the poor.? He needs to tell us more:

(a) What is the source of information: Is it household surveys, national income account or a geographic information system data devised by his ministry?

(b) Is he talking about absolute poverty, moderate poverty or relative property?

(c) What proportion of Mauritian household live in extreme poverty?

(d) What is the spatial distribution of poverty in terms of electricity, roads, water and sanitation and other communication services

(e) How demographic conditions is linked to poverty?

(f) What are the other risk factors exacerbating poverty?

(g) How commodity price fluctuation has lately affected the poorest of the poor interms of undernutrition and diseases.

If we have these quantitative and qualitative data; let us be hold enough to analyse and interpret it to chalk out an effective strategy where the poor will at least gain a foothold on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder, from which they can then proceed to climb on their own. As a nation, we have signed the UN millenium declaration in 2002, that is, cutting poverty by half by 2015. We need to converge from our different starting points and act in unison to fight the dreaded disease named poverty.

Before, we agree to the principle of targeting, we need to outline certain difficulties related to the application of targeting. But, the point of outlining these difficulties is not to suggest that targeting is a problematic issue. Our information system has to be smart to eliminate the ?type 1? error of including the non-needy among the needy and the ?type 2? error of not including the needy among the rightful beneficiaries. The second superficial difficulty will be the implicit administration procedural cost of professional investigation and policing. But what is more fearful that the potentates of bureaucy will enjoy vis-à-vis the poor. And last, a user friendly gatekeeping will need to be designed to forevent corruption between the potentates and the beneficiaries.

We all agree that the end of poverty is an end to extreme suffering. Euclid is supposed to have told ptolemy. There is no ?royal road? to geometry. And the same analogy can be applied to the context of targeting. There is no royal road to eradicate poverty. We need to learn the lesson of clinical medicine: the human body is a complex system, complexity requires a differential diagnosis, all medicine is family medecine and monitoring and evaluation are essential to successful treatment. The poor and unstable economy we inherited in July 2005 shares many challenges of clinical medicine. Economists need to be trained and think like clinicians. But apart from being a clinical economist, let us not forget, we have democracy, a visioning leadership, human and political freedom, good governance, social opportunities like education and health, healthy public management system, human capital, basic infrastructure, vibrant judicial system to help us to mitigate the paralysing effects of poverty. Let me end by saying the destinies of the ?haves? are intrinsically linked to the fate of the ?have-nothing-at-alls?.

Dr Hon. Rajendrakumar MUNGUR