Date: 29/12/2022

Relevance: GS-3: Climate Change and international conventions; Sustainable Development Goals.

Key Phrases: Sustainable Development Goal, UNDP, Greenhouse Gas, Localisation of SDGs, SDG India Index, NITI Aayog, Climate Change, Inclusive and Sustainable Development, Partnership, Institutional Framework.

Context:

• With the 2030 deadline approaching, there has been a global shift towards the ‘localisation’ of SDGs.

Key Highlights:

• The United Nations defines sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.
  • The SDGs marked a paradigm shift in the development agenda.
• SDG localisation in India has such a strong foundation and the world has so much to learn from India.

Progress of India on SDGs:

• India has whole-heartedly accepted, engaged and progressed with the idea of SDG implementation at the policy level.
• This is evident by the timely submission of Voluntary National Reviews of 2017 and 2020 and adoption of SDG Index.
• About 330 million more people have gained access to improved sanitation, 233 million more people have obtained access to clean cooking fuel, electricity coverage has improved from 88% to 97% benefiting 183 million more people, health coverage programmes covering over 500 million people have been rolled out and pediatric vaccination has also improved.

Grassroot Approach: Localisation of SDGs

• Localisation process not only recognises the sub-national contexts of setting of goals to determine the means of implementation but also offers customized solutions.
• Indian model of SDG localisation has four pillars:
  • Creating institutional ownership;
  • Establishing a robust review and monitoring system;
  • Developing capacities for integrating SDGs in planning and monitoring and
  • Promoting a "whole society approach".
• The preparation for a Local Indicator Framework (LIF) at GP level is already in process where nine themes have been designed subsuming 17 SDGs, Kerala being a front-runner.
• Potential Challenges:
  • The challenges range from lack of awareness and coordination to lack of use of technology and a streamlined institutional framework.
  • The desired foundational framework already exists and a mission-mode intervention led by a ‘Whole of Government’ approach is required.

SDG India Index 2020-21

• About:
  • It evaluates progress of states and Union Territories (UTs) on various parameters including health, education, gender, economic growth, institutions, climate change and environment.
  • First launched in December 2018 by NITI Aayog, the index has become the primary tool for monitoring progress on the SDGs in India.
  • The index is developed in collaboration with the United Nations in India.
  • The SDG India Index scores range between 0–100, higher the score of a State/UT, the greater the distance to target achieved.
  • States and UTs are classified in four categories based on their SDG India Index score — aspirant: 0–49; performer: 50–64; front-runner: 65–99, achiever: 100.
  • It has also fostered competition among the states and UTs by ranking them on the global goals.
• Findings of 2020-21:
  • In a significant marker of improvement, no State fared in the ‘Aspirant’ category, the lowest in the index.
  • All the States managed to score above 50 points in SDG implementation, with 13 States featuring in the ‘Performer’ category and 15 in the ‘Front Runner’ category (the second-highest position).
    • Kerala has retained the top rank in NITI Aayog's SDG India Index 2020-21, while Bihar is the worst performing state.
  • There was improvement in the overall performance of the country towards SDG implementation.
  • India stepped into the ‘Front Runner’ category with a score of 66 points, though it dropped two ranks in the ordinal scale.
    • However, our neighboring countries performed better than us.
  • India did well in implementing SDGs 6,7, 11 and 12, which are ‘clean water and sanitation’, ‘affordable and clean energy’, ‘sustainable cities and communities’, and ‘sustainable consumption and production’, respectively, but did not do well in many others.

Way Forward:

• For localisation at the village level, hand holding from the district is a must.
  • There is a need to spread awareness among the masses and sensitize the elected representatives (ERs) at the village and district levels, for which the local culture’s soft power must be harnessed.
  • There is also a need to conduct awareness sessions on how VPs can generate their own resources.
    • For instance, fallow lands may be converted into parking lots, community halls, nurseries for plant saplings.
• Workshops with multilateral development institutions like UNDP, block and district level administration, SHGs will prove beneficial.
• For training ERs, standardized institutional module training finalized at the State level, may be provided through dedicated training institutes like KILA in Kerala.
• The private sector also must be roped in — SBI’s village adoption and macro-based Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana can be a template.
• There is a need to streamline the institutional framework.
  • The author recommends a four-tiered institutional structure to engage all key stakeholders.
  • At the village level, an SDG Cell consisting of political and permanent executives, line departments, and leaders with mass reach, can ensure coordination, need assessment and theme selection, and awareness generation, thereby ensuring integration of SDGs with VPDPs.
    • The coordination among these members may be ensured by the ‘facilitator’.
  • These Cells may be brought together by a block-level nodal officer.
  • A District Cell and Project Director of Institution Formation and Capacity Building can be set up to coordinate the efforts at village and block level ensuring vertical integration in planning.
  • A State Level Steering Committee headed by Chief Secretary with officials from Planning Departments, Capacity Training institutes and other key departments, should be set up.
• There is also a need to setup a dashboard that fetches data from block level data feeding centers on LIFs.
  • This dashboard will be a repository of information and also incentivise VPs to perform through identification of model GPs, review, recognition and documentation of good work.
• Partnership is the key to achieve this.
  • The current level of collaboration with States, UTs, civil society organizations and businesses should be further enhanced by overlooking any differences in political ideologies.

Conclusion:

• There is a need to aggressively implement SDG localisation efforts at the district, panchayat and village levels so that implementation feedback from the field is available, besides enabling true internalization of the SDGs by the community.
• Only work at the community level can make SDGs truly achievable and deliverable.

Source: BusinessLine

Mains Question:

Q. How is the localisation of the SDGs the key to achieving SDG objectives? Also, discuss associated potential challenges and suggest measures to overcome these challenges. (250 Words).