Chapter 6: Responses Over the United Nations SDGs in India

The very beginning of the 21st century witnessed two global declarations by the United Nations General Assembly – Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), respectively, adopted in 2000 and 2015. The member nations and states were at different stages of implementation of the eight MDGs, which were advanced as a mark of the commencement of the new millennium. They include (a) eradicating extreme poverty and hunger; (b) achieving universal primary education; (c) promoting gender equality and empowering women; (d) reducing child mortality; (e) improving maternal health; (f) combating HIV/AIDS/malaria and other diseases; (g) ensuring environmental sustainability and (h) developing global partnerships for development. Although these goals were implemented and fringe benefits have also accrued to the developing societies from the declaration of the MDGs, substantial could not be achieved over all the goals for reasons. Excessive emphasis on eradication of poverty and improving poor status of the people trapped with the help of foreign financial aid (Sharma & Chaturvedi, 2020, UNDP, 2015) and no time-binding to achieve the goals (Carley & Christine, 2017) have been offered by the researches as reasons. Apart from that, governance factors like public policy commitments and strategic roadmaps, the importance of the public programmes vis-á-vis the MDGs, institutional arrangements and their accountability, monitoring mechanisms and progress assessment and others in developing countries were completely ignored. Following a lapse of over one and a half decades and limited success achieved on the social, economic and environmental fronts, the SDGs were designed and adopted as the newer version of MDGs. However, the major difference that SDGs made is the significant thrust laid on the holistic approach for the development of developing societies. It has encompassed the demography, socio-economic conditions, economic growth and most importantly geographical, environmental and ecological systems broadly concerning the developing and least-developed countries.