More than 740 million people are surviving on USD1.25 (RM3.98) per day while an estimated 1.6 billion people lived on USD2 per day in the Asia Pacific region, a regional workshop was told here Friday.

Asian Development Bank (ADB) vice-president Bindu N. Lohandi said 60 per cent of the population in the Asia Pacific region were in the starving group while up to 18 million children of school-going age did not attend school and a majority of them left school after completing primary school.

Thus the wide gap must be addressed in the Asia-Pacific region to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) in 2015, he said at the Regional Workshop on Sustainable Development Goals attended by experts in the field, here Friday.

He said this region was also identified as the area that is most prone to disasters, that is, between the years 1970 to 2010, the number of flood victims rose from 30 million to 64 million while the population in typhoon-prone areas rose from 72 million to 121 million.

At the workshop, Lohani also discussed issues that would crop up after 2015, including the rising inequality and unemployment, starvation, an increase in the number of non-contagious diseases, discrimination against women and unplanned urbanization.