While countries around the world have been considering how to implement and measure success against the Goals, NITI Aayog has taken the lead by bringing out the SDG India Index – Baseline Report 2018, and showing how SDGs will be measured in India.
NITI Aayog has constructed the SDG India Index spanning across 13 out of 17 SDGs (leaving out Goals 12, 13, 14 and 17). The Index tracks the progress of all the States and Union Territories (UTs) on a set of 62 National Indicators, measuring their progress on the outcomes of the interventions and schemes of the Government of India. The SDG India Index is intended to provide a holistic view on the social, economic and environmental status of the country and its States and UTs.
The Index will be useful to States/UTs in assessing their progress on the SDGs in the following ways:
- Support States/UTs to assess their progress against national targets and performance of their peers to understand reasons for differential performance and devise better strategies to achieve the SDGs by 2030.
- Support States/UTs to identify priority areas in which they need to invest and improve by enabling them to measure incremental progress.
- Highlight data gaps related across SDGs for India to develop its statistical systems at the national and State levels.
Recently the NITI Aayog’s SDG Index for 2019 was released and in which southern state proved to be better than the Northern states. The major constraint is performance in gender Parity where barring 2-3 states, others were performing poorly.