India needs 6.2 additional spending of GDP to achieve 2030 development goals: NITI

According to NITI Aayog’s second Voluntary National Review (VNR) released at the United Nations high-level political forum (HLPF) on sustainable development, 2020, India needs to increase its spending by an additional 6.2 per cent of GDP along with doing major upgradation of its statistical system, improving its monitoring mechanism and increasing capacity building of all stakeholders, if it wants to achieve sustainable development goals by 2030.

The preliminary estimates were given by the NITI Aayog-IMF study that India needs to increase its SDG spending by an additional 6.2 per cent of its GDP until 2030. “The ways and means for this additional financing need to be identified. At the same time, it is crucial to make sure that the budget allocations align with SDG priorities,” the Aayog said.

There is need to realise the 2030 Agenda that requires state-of-the-art reporting and monitoring tools to assess progress under the framework and enable course-correction. Though, 36 out of the 169 SDG target indicators are not included in the current national indicator framework (NIF) “To ensure that the NIF is a comprehensive tool to monitor the whole of SDGs, the missing indicators will be identified or designed, following a consultative process, and added to the NIF,” said the Aayog.

Surveys must be done at a shorter interval to help in accessing progress of SGDs across the board periodically.

It also pointed out that the limited number of indicators do not present data at the state level, presenting a challenge to the SDG localisation model adopted by India. “It is also essential to collect and present data disaggregated by gender, social category, income groups, among others for sharper SDG monitoring which will lead to focused policy focused policy advice,” the Aayog said.

Summarizing the need and roadmap for improving data quality, the Aayog said India needs to adopt third-party independent surveys for SDG data besides using modern tools and technologies of data collection such as tablets, mobile phones, and geospatial data and consider using citizen-generated data. “This approach will get rid of pen and paper surveys which are more time and resource consuming and makes data cross-checking a cumbersome task,” it said.

NITI Aayog vice chairman Mr Rajiv Kumar presented the India VNR 2020 report titled Decade of Action: Taking SDGs from Global to Local at the United Nations High-level Political Forum (HLPF) on Sustainable Development, 2020.

The HLPF is the leading international platform for follow-up and review of progress on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This year, HLPF is being hosted virtually due to the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Around 47 member states will be presenting their VNRs between July 10-16, 2020. In 2017, NITI Aayog had presented India’s first VNR.

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.