30 Apr SDGs and India’s achievements so far
SDGs and India’s achievements so far – Today Current Affairs
The SDGs were adopted by India along with all countries in the world at a United Nations (UN) summit on sustainable development in 2015 in order to address the core development issues facing the planet, and to embrace priorities in social, economic, and environmental areas. These core global development priorities were identified through widespread consultations leading to a global consensus.
The lack of discussion on India’s progress towards the SDGs keeps domestic stakeholders ignorant of where their country is heading in these vital development areas. The SDGs should not suffer the same fate as befell the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that ended in 2015, remaining largely unknown and ignored in domestic development discourses. The lack of sufficient discussion and feedback may have contributed to their mixed outcomes for India. Assessments conducted on India’s performance on the MDGs show that its performance on the MDGs left much to be desired.
With only eight years remaining for the SDGs to end, more attention to achieving them is therefore called for. In addition, in the last two years, the COVID-19 pandemic has not only decelerated India’s progress on the SDGs, but in some cases, it likely has even reversed them, such as extreme poverty. Both the World Bank (2020) and Asian Development Bank (2021) simulations indicate that COVID-19 has harmed progress towards the SDGs significantly.3 Therefore, bringing the country back on track to achieve them by 2030 must be an overriding task post the COVID-19 development priority. The Hindu Analysis
However, a reading of the chapter on the SDGs in the Economic Survey 2021–22 leaves one somewhat disappointed on several counts.The chapter discusses mainly comparative progress on the SDGs between Indian states and union territories with hardly any discussion on India’s overall progress as a country. The inclusion of specific themes and topics in the Economic Survey, which is released just before the union budget, leads usually to an expectation that it would provide rationale for adjustment in budgetary allocations or major changes in policies, etc, concerning the topic. However, the focus almost entirely on the states and union territories in the chapter on SDG belies this. While obviously achieving the SDGs are the collective responsibility of both the centre and the states, each have major roles to play. More attention to India’s overall status on the SDGs and the centre’s role in achieving them was, therefore, necessary.
A similar neglect of India’s overall performance on the SDGs can be observed in the SDG reports that have been brought out by the NITI Aayog.4 While an assessment of the progress being made by the states and union territories—measured through an SDG index and dashboard developed by the NITI Aayog—is very useful, the SDG reports should also deal prominently with the country’s progress as a whole, which has been largely missing.
Progress on the SDGs : The Hindu Analysis
As indicated earlier, the chapter on SDG in the Economic Survey 2021–22 provides only minimal reference to India’s progress as a whole, merely stating that India’s overall score on the NITI Aayog SDG India Index and Dashboard improved to 66 in 2020–21 from 60 in 2019–20 and 57 in 2018–19, showing progress in India’s journey towards achieving the SDGs.
Such a statement may lead to the erroneous conclusion that India is making rapid progress towards achieving the SDGs since the overall index improved by 10% in 2020–21 over the previous year and reaching a score of 100 in another 10 years would therefore appear to be easily in India’s grasp. In fact, the actual picture is quite different. Using the NITI Aayog’s own data gleaned from the three years that the SDG reports have appeared, India’s individual composite indices for 15 SDGs with data are presented in Table 1. Simple forecasts using linear regression of these indices for 2030 using the previous data points provides some idea of the likelihood of the targets (that is, maximum value of 100) being achieved. The results show that as many as eight of the 15 SDGs with data are unlikely to be achieved, including the important goals of poverty; hunger; education; employment; inequality; climate action; life on land; and peace, justice, and institutions. Today Current Affairs
But these overall Goal indices are too aggregative and therefore deceptive, as discussed earlier, as they do not reveal the true situation as far as critical constituent indices are concerned. Also, the composite indicators are not comparable as the composition of sub-indices has varied over the years. Hence, it will be useful to take a more disaggregated look, focusing more attention on individual SDG indicators, which the rest of this article will do.
To better appreciate the status of some critical SDG indicators, two questions will be sought to be answered: (i) How does India stand vis-à-vis the world and East Asia and the Pacific? and (ii) What is the likelihood of India achieving the SDGs with respect to these individual indicators?
Geographical Comparisons : The Hindu Analysis
One way to assess India’s standing on the SDGs is to compare the current levels of attainment with other countries. To facilitate this, two important comparisons are being made: the world average (which includes apart from developed countries, 155 developing countries with over 84% of the world’s population);5 and the average of countries of East Asia and the Pacific (EAP), excluding high-income countries,6 to which India is compared with, comprising China, South East Asian countries, and developing Pacific Island countries/nations. With India’s aspirations towards a $5 trillion economy, we should be doing better than the world average, which consists overwhelmingly of developing countries and soon catching up or exceeding the EAP countries’ average.
Forty-one indicators, mainly from the World Bank’s SDG database,7 were chosen, primarily on the basis of data availability, to conduct this comparison. These represent the most relevant indicators for the concerned Goals among those with data availability. These are shown against the corresponding Goals and the concerned target numbers. The Hindu Analysis
Of the 41 indicators, 19 (46.3%) show that India’s present SDG indicator has a lower value than both the world and EAP averages. In the case of another 13 indicators (31.7%), India’s attainment is either worse than the world or worse than the EAP average. Together, these two sets of indicators represent 78% of all the indicators and indicate a relatively poor state of attainment of India’s SDG indicators, when matched with other countries’ performance.
Forecasting India’s SDG Status : The Hindu Analysis
Apart from the current status of the SDGs, compared to other countries, it is necessary to make some assessment of whether India’s progress on the SDGs is sufficient for achieving them by 2030 or not. If progress is weak, efforts must be stepped up in the lagging areas to ensure that India does not fail to attain the targets. This type of exercise needs to be carried out regularly by the central government and the results be made available to the public.
Goals That Are of Concern : The Hindu Analysis
Considering both international comparisons and the likelihood of missing SDG targets, the following goals and highlighted areas within them are of concern and more efforts should be focused on attaining them.
Goal 2: Hunger—especially incidence in children; and low agricultural productivity given by low cereal yields.
Goal 3: Health—particularly non-communicable diseases and insufficient health personnel. Reducing high deaths from road accidents is also a priority.
Goal 4: Education—concerns are regarding ensuring education for all at pre-primary, primary, and secondary.
Goal 5: Gender equality—several indicators show that considerable gender inequality persists.
Goal 7: Clean energy—concerns are about inadequate access to clean fuels for cooking; and insufficient renewable energy mix in the total electricity production.
Goal 8: Decent work—the main concern is the rising unemployment in general and particularly among youth.
Goal 9: Industry and innovation–concerns are related to inadequate manufacturing share in the GDP and insufficient spending on research and development (R&D).
Goal 10: Reducing inequalities—rising inequality is a major concern.
Goal 11: Liveable cities—air pollution is a major problem.
Goals 14 and 15: Protection of natural resources—insufficient protection is being provided for both marine and terrestrial natural resources.
Today Current Affairs
Conclusions
This article attempts to present a quick assessment of India’s status on the SDGs. It is clear from even a preliminary perusal of the data that India’s current status compared to other developing countries is unsatisfactory; and its progress towards achieving the SDGs by 2030 is slow for more than half of the critical indicators that could be studied. India is falling behind in several critical economic, human, and environmental areas of development. The Covid-19 pandemic has further hampered the development efforts, and unless India rebounds quickly from the pandemic, the effort to attain the SDGs will falter even further.
To rectify the situation, the first action needed is to make a full and thorough assessment of India’s overall SDG performance, in addition to that for the states. A regular national-level stocktaking is essential so that appropriate policies can be designed to rectify what is obviously an unsatisfactory situation and bring the SDGs well within India’s reach.
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plutus ias daily current affairs 30 April 2022 Hindi
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