India and the SDGs

The year 2030 marks the culmination of a consolidated global effort – towards a common agenda and a defined set of goals and targets for the world. Referred to as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the world reaches the mid-point of the window for the achievement of these goals, in 2023. ‘India and the SDGs’ is a series that highlights case studies from India that could be transformative if scaled and replicated, not just in India but across other geographies.

India’s Presidency of the G20, during 2023 and its leadership in crafting a development agenda for the Global South, has allowed the country to draw attention to many of these best practices and encourage their adoption.

What progress has been made on the SDGs?

The SDG Mid-Term Review – which was launched in July 2022 – is identifying the development milestones attained by the UN member states so far, assessing gaps in progress, and re-setting the targets that must be met by 2030.

According to The Sustainable Development Goals Report- 2023, early efforts after the Sustainable Development Goals were adopted produced some favourable trends. Extreme poverty and child mortality rates continued to fall. Inroads were made against such health concerns such as HIV and hepatitis. Some targets for gender equality were seeing positive results. However, on a lot of targets progress has been slower than required to achieve some of the goals. Since 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic, the conflict in Ukraine, and increasing concerns around climate-related events are posing further challenges to achievement of the SDGs.

In this context, solutions, innovations and ideas from across the world to accelerate the progress are urgently required. ’India and the SDGs’ provides insights into some of the most pressing questions: How can the global community come together over the next seven years to achieve the ambitious goals it set out in 2015? What are the chief lessons learned from the SDG implementation exercise? Who are the key actors who might define the next phase of international development, and what kinds of new strategic partnerships might one expect? Most of all, how do we ensure that no one is left behind?

Ideas, innovations, and implementation packed into this series of articles aim to offer insights from the experiences of diverse development actors, that can be potentially replicated.