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The Post-2015 Development Agenda succeeded the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the form of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and it was agreed upon by the international community including India in September, 2015. The SDGs promised to go beyond poverty reduction with special focus on “Leave No One Behind” and it covers the issues related to equality, social justice, economic development, and environmental sustainability. Thus, SDGs are not merely a continuation of MDGs but an expansion of it. A UN document on SDGs ‘Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’, puts forward 17 goals and 169 targets that are universal, integrated and indivisible for the development. At the global level, 300 indicators have been developed for monitoring and reviewing the progress of SDGs.

Though national governments were not legally bound to implement SDGs, however, it was expected from them to take ownership and integrate SDGs with their national policy framework in order to achieve the desired results by 2030.

To achieve the goals under the SDGs, each participant country is supposed to raise its own resources through domestic sources, funding from private sector, and crackdown on illicit financial flows and corruption. SDGs have provided a new opportunity for India on the development front to align its policies, programmes, enhancing budgets and improving the preparedness of the national and sub-national governments to implement them.

In this direction, Union Government of India tried to align SDGs with its National Development Agenda and has to bring out key policy documents such as Vision, Strategy and Action Agenda. Similar exercises have to be carried out at the state and district level as well. The Vision document was supposed to focus on the social, economic and environmental goals proposed for SDGs up to 2030, with an aim to transform India into a prosperous, highly educated, healthy, secured, corruption free, energy abundant, environmentally clean and globally influential nation. So far, the Vision document by Union Government is not ready for sharing in public domain but a few States have prepared and released it. Seven years Strategy document has been released in 2018 covering the period from 2017-18 to 2023-24. This document focusses on converting the long term vision into implementable policies. The Action Agenda would help translate the goals of the Government into actions targeted to be achieved by 2019. It is a part of National Development Agenda to review the progress of SDGs for last three years (2017-18 to 2019-20) of the 14th Finance Commission Award period.

Further, mapping of schemes and programmes have been carried out by Ministries and Departments in Union and the select State governments as per SDG goals but no framework has been prepared at the levels of districts/ local governments. To monitor SDGs and its associated targets, a National Indicator Framework (NIF) comprising 306 national indicators has been developed by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) in consultation with Central Ministries/ Departments, States and other stakeholders, such as, UN Agencies and CSOs. NITI Aayog, in partnership with UN India, developed a SDG India Index Baseline Report (composite index comprising of 62 indicators across 14 SDGs) and a Dashboard, in December 2018. Dashboard measures the achievements made by States and UTs towards various SDG targets, by ranking them on a select set of development indicators. Similar efforts have to be made by States and local governments to implement SDGs through their own local level priorities integrating with national priorities.

Although NITI Aayog and some States have taken policy initiatives, but there are several challenges in addressing the possible bottlenecks in the institutions, processes relating to planning, implementation and monitoring of SDGs and access to benefits.  Firstly, in terms of localization of SDGs, the process of policy and budget making, planning, implementation and monitoring of strategy is not clearly reflecting SDGs at the level of State and local governments. Further, devolution of funds, functions and functionaries (3Fs) to local governments as per provision of 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment Act is still a distant dream in most of the States. Hence, local governments (rural and urban) are not able to prepare people’s plan and local budgets for their respective areas through people’s participation. NITI Aayog being a nodal agency for monitoring the implementation of SDGs at the national level has not made any serious effort for pursuing States for devolving 3Fs to local governments.

Secondly, like NITI Aayog, the State Planning Departments/Boards in the States have been made nodal agency to oversee the process of implementation of SDGs at the State level.  So far many States are not prepared for implementation of SDGs given their capacity in terms of adequacy of financial and human resources and decentralized planning processes followed by them. Further, little efforts have been made to redesign the policies and enhance the budgetary provisions as per the local felt needs.

Thirdly, there has been a poor effort to address the issues and challenges for increasing the domestic resources mobilisation. Further, the share of Union Budget expenditure out of GDP had declined from 13.3 per cent in 2014-15 to 13.2 per cent in 2019-20 (Budget Estimates). Union Government’s poor capacity to mobilise the financial resources will reduce the quantum of public spending on social and economic services at the level of State and local governments because they are largely dependent on the transfers from the above. Further, the development policies and budget heads of Union and State Governments have not been fully integrated with SDGs.

Fourthly, it was observed that there has been inadequacy in unit cost of services such as old pension scheme, disability pension, widow pension, housing scheme, Supplementary Nutrition Programme, Mid-Day Meal Schemes, Pre Matric and Post Matric Scholarships for Minorities, honorarium for frontline service provider, school teachers, health workers, Workers and Helpers of Anganwadi Centre and cooks. This leads to poor quality of service delivery by many flagship programmes and public institutions.

Fifthly, there has been a delay in fund flow owing to delayed release of funds at the local level from the state and central government due to several reasons. Systemic weakness (institutional capacity) of line departments, Panchayati Raj Institutions and Municipal Corporations leads to poor absorption of funds. Inadequacy of human resources, training and capacity entails poor planning and implementation of schemes and programmes. Most of the line departments are understaffed and also high rate of vacancies are noticed at Gram Panchayats, Block Panchayats and District Panchayats. These issues have poor impact on the planning processes and weaken the implementation and monitoring of SDGs.

Sixthly, monitoring of outcomes has been one of the major challenges under SDGs due to lack of preparation of development indicators at State, district and block levels. Further, it has been observed that there is an irregular data reporting on outcomes and there is a lack of capacity of data preparation at Gram Panchayats, Block Panchayats and District Panchayats. Finally, the framework of monitoring and tracking the development benefits adopted by the Union Government did not have adequate focus on the inclusion of marginalized communities even though social inclusion is one of the three pillars of SDGs. There is lack of awareness and poor participation by marginalized communities (SCs, STs, OBCs and minorities) in planning and implementation of SDGs at the local level.

To overcome the above mentioned challenges, current policy initiatives on SDGs should focus on making changes in the policy design, creating new institutions and development programmes, strengthening the institutions run by the State and local governments.

It is also important to enhance the financial resources to have better unit cost of services and adequate payment to staffs, who are engaged with social and economic sectors. The adequacy of staff and their trainings have to be given top priority for better implementation of SDGs. There is a need for developing monitoring indicators and database on SDGs at the level of State and local governments. It would be useful if NITI Aayog may engage regularly with CSOs, think tanks, research organisations and academic institutions along with Planning Departments and District Planning Committees to have better local level feedback on implementation, monitoring and evaluation of SDGs.

 

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and don’t necessarily reflect the position of CBGA. You can reach Jawed Alam Khan at jawed@cbgaindia.org.