Mathur Ritika Passi

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THIRTEEN SDGs in India, Institutionally Speaking SANJEEV AHLUWALIA, ADVISOR, ORF WILL THE COMPLEXITY OF THE SDGs be a drag? Te Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and targets reflect a broad international conceptual consensus that development must not come at the cost of degrading the environment irreversibly. How significant is this new effort to merge “green” goals with the more standard “developmental” goals likely to be? This commentary explores the institutional reality and concerns that need to be considered for India to streamline the internalisation of the SDGs. The institutional case for embedding environmental concerns into development is strong. Unless a pervasive concern for the environment is embedded into all development practices across sectors, effective progress in inclusive development is unlikely. Mainstreaming environmental sustainability into the earlier Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which complete their course this year, can partially make up for the failures under the Kyoto Protocol 1997 process to limit emissions and align aid in a manner which is environmentally benign. The SDGs follow the pattern of “league tables”—common indicators fed by cross-country data generated by using a common methodology. They consequently assist in a universalised assessment process and stimulate competition to perform better. The MDGs were top-down goals driven by donors, implicitly making Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) disbursements linked to performance on the MDGs. But inefficiencies and poor incentives for performance abounded. Lack of country ownership, gaming and poor budget execution constrained their effectiveness to enhance performance. 1 A fifty country (including India) assessment, which the United Nations Development Programme’s Independent Evaluation Office commissioned in June 2014, 2 lists these issues. Compared to the MDGs, the SDG formulation process has been much more inclusive and participative. But it is unclear, after the three-year long process (2012- 2015), how the infirmities of the earlier MDG arrangements have been addressed. It does not help that the SDGs are far more complex than the MDGs. Monitoring them is expected to be significantly more demanding, requiring new and more onerous statistical effort at the national level. National Priorities and Capacities India is likely to be one of the countries that uses the broad SDG agenda and matrix selectively, using a “value for money” perspective. The availability of ODA is not
THE ASYMMETRY IN FISCAL POWERS ENSURES BASIC SYMMETRY IN DEVELOPMENTAL POLICIES, INCUBATED PRIMARILY BY THE UNION GOVERNMENT. a significant consideration for India. ODA accounts for just 0.15% of total receipts in the current fiscal 2015-16. India’s sustainable development priorities are succinctly embedded in the five-year plans of the Union government. The Twelfth Five Year Plan (2012-2017) is still being implemented. A new national policy formulation and implementation architecture is being evolved by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It is expected it shall lean towards enhanced federalism and the devolution of resources to provincial and local governments. Participative and inclusive democracy are key themes along with social justice and shared prosperity. These broad themes resonate well with the agenda of the SDGs. 3 How well prepared is India to implement the SDGs from 2016 onward? I argue that India has a sophisticated institutional framework, which recognises the imperative to adopt complex goals and to coordinate state effort—both vertically across levels of government and horizontally across agencies within a level of government— with the active participation of non-state actors, in a collective effort to achieve these goals. The proof of the pudding lies in the fact that the all the eight goals and 12 targets of the MDGs were incorporated into the planning and budgetary process, and the 35 indicators were monitored and reported. Consequently, it would not be difficult to also incorporate the SDGs into the existing development strategy framework going ahead. The extent to which these targets can be monitored and the quality of the metrics—how well the chosen proxies will reflect achievements on the ground—will depend significantly on the indicators, which are yet to be chosen. Enabling Institutional Features Until the late 1970s the ability of the Union (federal) government to drive a national development agenda was virtually assured. A constitutional bias towards centralisation was reinforced by the legacy of the independence movement, which united the polity. Adoption of a central planning process on the template of Soviet Russia, reservation of the “commanding heights of the economy” for the public sector 4 and large-scale nationalisation of private business and industry in the 1960s and 70s all served to significantly bias the skew of fiscal power towards the Centre, far beyond what was intended in the constitution. Some of these centralising drivers have been tempered by subsequent changes in the international economic architecture, most specifically—the bias against the private sector is fiscally unsustainable today; political plurality defines the Indian party system; since 1992 a third level of government at the local level has been constitutionally mandated via an amendment, although implementation of the provision has been left to state governments; since 2014 the Finance Commission now specifically devolves shares in Central revenues to local governments; and economic liberalisation has released our “animal spirits” and enhanced growth. Happily, despite the muscularity of federalism and political pluralism over the last three decades, policy perspectives have converged rather than diverged across parties; policy coherence is the leitmotif, despite regular changes in governments; and the imperative of practicality trumps ideology. The section below reviews the institutional drivers and trends. The Indian Constitution The Indian constitution, adopted in 1949 and effective from 1950, makes India a Union of States. But it is not strictly a federal polity. Unlike in the United States, each of the twenty eight provinces (called state governments in India) do not have separate constitutions, nor can they secede from the Union, principally because the Indian polity was not created by individual provinces agreeing to form a federation. This is why India is classified as a unitary state with federal characteristics, or a 77
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GP-ORF Series Edited by Vikrom Math
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GLOBAL GOALS, NATIONAL ACTIONS Maki
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( EIGHT Providing Water and Sanitat
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ONE Sustainable Development: Emerge
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esearch and activist organisations
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Financing the SDGs: The Global Conv
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An international framework notwiths
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implementation that could be explor
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with the perpetuation of poverty an
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There is likely to be a lack of com
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INDICATOR BASE YEAR (1990) LATEST S
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Despite schemes like MGNREGA focusi
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have significantly high PHCRs. In f
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Page 61 and 62: Figure 1: India’s Annual GDP Grow
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Mathur Ritika Passi

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