Q.What are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? How are they relevant to India's development planning?

The SDGs give India's own planning institutions an internationally agreed, non-income yardstick for development, in the same spirit as PQLI and HDI earlier in this chapter. …

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a set of 17 global goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015, as part of its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, intended to be achieved by the year 2030. They succeed an earlier set of UN targets, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which ran from 2000 to 2015.

The SDGs are broader in scope than the MDGs: alongside poverty, hunger, health and education (themes the MDGs also covered), they explicitly include economic growth and decent work, industry and infrastructure, reduced inequality, sustainable cities, responsible consumption and production, climate action, and peace and strong institutions — reflecting the view that economic, social and environmental goals are interconnected rather than separate.

For India's development planning, the SDGs are relevant in two concrete ways:

1. NITI Aayog (see the previous question) has taken on the role of coordinating and monitoring India's progress toward the SDGs across central ministries and state governments, including through periodic index-based assessments comparing states and districts. …

Confusing the SDGs with the MDGs, or stating an incorrect count/timeline — the SDGs are 17 goals for 2015-2030, distinct from and broader than the 2000-2015 MDGs th …