New Delhi, Aug 21: Lashing out at the developed countries for paying only lip service to the sustainable development agenda, India today demanded that they must recommit themselves for a global partnership by enhancing the funding under overseas development assistance to help the less developed. Ahead of the World Summit on Sustainable Development beginning in Johannesburg from August 26, the government regretted that despite significant progress in poverty eradication, literacy and healthcare, there still remains a gulf between "the standards prevailing in India and the rest of the world."

The assessment report on agenda 21, presented to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee by Minister of Environment and Forests T R Baalu today said "the commitment made by the developed world towards enhanced and stable concessional financing to the developing world have largely gone unfulfilled." As developing countries struggle with the limited resources to meet the immediate and more basic requirement of the people, it is imperative that the north plays its role in order to operationalise the long-term mandate of agenda 21, it said.

The developing countries are demanding that the developed world responsible for more than half of Co2 emissions from industrial sources and land use, should increase their overseas development assistance from a dismal 0.3 per cent of their GDP to 0.7 per cent as committed in Rio summit a decade ago. Bureau Report