Washington: India's nominee for the post of Secretary General Shashi Tharoor has suggested a four-point plan to revamp the world body.
He said the greatest problem for the world body is that it does not have one big issue to deal with but a host of them clamouring for attention.
An international institution like the United Nations with "impressive achievements" and "haunting failures" has changed but needs to change further, he said in an article in the forthcoming issue of Newsweek International.
"We need reform not because the United Nations has failed, but because it has succeeded enough over the years to be worth investing in," Tharoor said.
His reform proposal focusses on four priority areas: making democracy a priority; bolster the ranks; prioritise and streamline; and heal wounds.
"The single greatest problem facing the United Nations is that there is no single greatest problem, rather, there are a dozen different ones each day clamouring for attention," Tharoor said.
"Some, like the crisis in Lebanon, the Palestinian situation and the nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, are obvious and trying," he said, going on to talk about "problems without passports" - issues like climate change, drug trafficking, human rights, terrorism, epidemic diseases, and refugee movements.
Tharoor, who is now a leading candidate to succeed Kofi Annan whose term expires at the end of the year, said finding solutions to these issues were beyond the ability of one nation or a group of countries and the key was "strengthening the capacities of both the United Nations and its members".
He said more efforts were needed to promote democracy and good governance as key ingredients of development.
"We now have a Democracy Fund to help us do that, financed not just by the rich West but by countries like India," he said.
"To that end the UN must also stand up for human rights everywhere, ensuring that the new Human Rights Council fulfills its responsibilities more effectively than the over-politicized Human Rights Commission it replaced," he added.
Tharoor has also pledged to strengthen the international civil service "eliminating the nepotism and cronyism for which we have sometimes justifiably been blamed".
He has stressed that in the process of prioritising and streamlining, the world body should be more sharply focussed on areas where it has proved to making a difference, like humanitarian disasters, peacekeeping and administering
territories.
But where others have the capacity, the resources and the will to keep the peace, like the NATO or the EU, the UN should bless their efforts, he added.
"And where the task, like enforcing peace in Iraq, is clearly beyond us, we should let wars be fought by warriors, not peacekeepers," he added.
In calling for healing wounds, Tharoor argued that there was a great danger of the East-West divide of the Cold War being replaced by a North-South divide at the UN.
"The new secretary-general must urgently combat this. I would focus on building issue-based coalitions to deal with specific practical problems (things like management inefficiencies, procurement policies, information technology, outsourcing) that have little to do with ideological politics," he said.
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