The Sustainable Development Goals, a universal and unprecedented set of 17 Goals and 169 targets, reflect an ambitious commitment by world leaders to achieve inclusive and interconnected economic, social and environmental well-being of their societies, by 2030. These constitute the Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by 193 Member States of the United Nations, which came into effect on January 1, 2016.
The global success of Agenda 2030: Sustainable Development Goals is decisively dependent on India’s progress in the next decade. This critical dependence can be attributed to India’s massive population, scale of national interventions and unique convergence of extraordinary economic growth, commitment to sustainability as well as social and technological innovations. Indian success stories in the 3 years since, can provide lessons for other countries.
Since India played a prominent role in the formulation of the SDGs and a significant part of the country’s National Development Agenda mirror those, the SDG India Index: Baseline Report 2018 is an advocacy tool for assessing the 3-year performance of Indian states and union territories (UTs), based on available social data sets, to trigger action based on existing strengths, areas of opportunity and identification of the way forward vis-à-vis development policies and practices.
The rationale for this report is that the state governments are instrumental for the advancement of the national development agenda. The Indian Government’s commitment towards the SDGs will be fruitful, only if complimented by the state governments, urban local bodies, panchayati raj institutions and civil society organisations, as necessitated by the federal governance structure and the gaping geographic, demographic and socio-economic disparities in the country.
India’s diverse ground realities call for long-term strategic planning, budgeting, monitoring, possible course corrections and implementation of development programmes at the sub-national level. For this purpose, the index allocates each state and UT a composite score, based on aggregate performances across 13 of the 17 SDGs. The index will also be used for monitoring on a real-time basis across 62 of 306 national indicators and self-reporting progress annually.
India scored a 57 out of 100. As per the scale, those with a rank of 100 will be termed Achievers, ranks between 65-99 are the Front Runners (green), those between 50-64 are Performers (yellow) and ranks between 0-49 are the Aspirants (red). This same scoring scale applies to individual states in the country as well. No state in India has achieved a perfect score of 100 yet.
According to Amitabh Kant’s note, cooperative federalism, infused with healthy competition, is key for the country’s holistic transformation at the grass-root level. The first-of-its-kind SDG index can be used by states to institutionalize the SDGs, benchmark their progress against national targets and other state performances and identify the limitations/interventions for priority areas, to put India ahead of the development curve.
Importantly, the process of preparation of the index has revealed that the selection of indicators was constrained by the absence of comprehensive statistical systems to generate data at the state level. Improved data availability and quality will make this real-time monitoring more robust. In order to strengthen the capacities for monitoring SDGs, NITI Aayog will ensure the refinement of the methodological processes and explore the potential for disaggregating data.
The index excludes state-specific schemes and sources of data and has assigned equal weightage for all indicators across all goals, possibly causing some data biases. For instance, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana(PMGSY) are less relevant in well-performing Punjab and Haryana, making their progress on these schematic indicators seem poorer in comparison to other States.
These images extracted from the index report, highlight the state rankings as well as the specific states that have emerged as leaders under each goal that was assessed. 4 goals i.e. sustainable consumption and production (Goal 12), climate action (Goal 13), sustainable use of marine resources or life below water (Goal 14) and partnership for the goals (Goal 17) have been excluded due to lack of data at the state level.
Thus, the SDG India Index 2018 report provides critical insights on the status of SDGs in India, with detailed insights about state performances vis-à-vis national schemes for each goal, despite lack of comprehensive representations of overall baseline. Subsequent reports will measure incremental progress with improvements in data availability and new estimation techniques. Until then, states can use this index as a valuable starting point for measuring progress and identifying intra-state disparitiesat district levels.
India Outbound
December 24, 2018
source https://indiaoutbound.org/the-sdg-india-index-baseline-report-2018/
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