Sustainable Development Goals: How India and the world are doing

The goals run from 2016 to 2030, which means we’re almost halfway through their set timelines. It would be informative to take stock of this and see how well the world (and India) is progressing on its SDG promises. Unfortunately, the short answer is that we’re nowhere near the halfway point.

We have compelling data on how the world and India are delivering on their promises from the work of Jeffrey Sachs and his colleagues at Columbia University, as last updated in their Sustainable Development Report 2022 (bit.ly/3DKs1Gr) went. Their work attempts to estimate how much of each country meets each of the SDGs, which are measured from 0% to 100% fulfillment. They also add scores to estimate the completion of the completed SDGs for individual countries, as well as estimates of completion for country groups and even for the world. Needless to say, the underlying statistics are less than perfect for assessing global progress across a wide range of very vague goals and targets, but sax-lead data is the world’s most consistent, global and long-term coverage.

If we look at the first graph, we see how the world experienced a steady increase in its collective SDG achievement from 2000 to 2019, just before the hit of Covid. At the turn of the century, countries around the world achieved just 59 per cent of all SDG promises, compared to 66% in 2019. The first decade of this century saw slow growth, while the rate of growth remained fairly stable in the 2010s.

It is perhaps not surprising that the world was meeting the SDGs even before they were put on the agenda. It only shows that the SDGs are mostly promises of good things that everyone wants to see happen – like fewer poor and hungry people in a world with more opportunity and less destruction. As the world has improved, with better education and fewer poor, our global SDG scores have increased.

But we are nowhere near 100% completion of the SDGs by 2030, as promised by all countries, including India. To achieve this, we should have seen global growth of 2.4 percent every year from 63.8% in 2015. Instead, we’ve actually seen growth of only 0.36 percent by 2021, which is about seven times slower. Part of this is due to the COVID pandemic, which completely stalled global progress from 2019-21. But even if we use the very optimistic trend line for 2015-19, the vast majority of the promised targets in 2030 will remain unfulfilled.

Another way to describe the discrepancy between promises and reality is to extrapolate linearly to when the world will reach 100%. This is a simple heuristic rather than a prediction, as nations nearing completion are likely to shift their emphasis and funding to other goals.

Based on current trends prior to the COVID pandemic, the world will fulfill its SDG promises only in 2078, almost half a century late. Taking 63 years instead of 15 means that progress is four times slower than promised.

Compared to other parts of the world, India seems to be an outlier and performs better as compared to the income groups of the World Bank. While India starts out somewhat below its lower-middle income group, it almost catches up, especially in the last four-year period before the Covid pandemic, 2015-19, where India stood at 4 percent compared to 3.1 percent. progresses with growth. For low-middle income countries in general.

At current 2015-19 trends, India is likely to overtake its lower-middle income country group before 2030. On current trends, the country is set to meet its SDGs around 2059. However it is still about three times slower than promised by 2030. For the SDGs, this is much better than the income group, or indeed any other group of countries in the world.

One reason for the slowdown is that some of the promises, such as the eradication of war, poverty, climate change, hunger and disease, are impossibly ambitious. Another reason is that promising everything makes it difficult to stay focused – having 169 goals is effectively equivalent to having no priorities. Most nations are clearly unable or unwilling to set aside enough resources to achieve all of their promises. Broadly speaking, our empirical results show that nations are only spending enough to move at one-quarter of the pace promised.

Instead, we should focus our resources more effectively. Economic cost-benefit analysis can help identify policies where few resources can help a lot and where too large resources can achieve little. In the current SDG world, where we are not achieving everything, we must allocate more resources to policies that will provide the most effective returns for the extra rupee, dollar or euro. Globally, evidence suggests that every rupee spent equally on all 169 targets will deliver 7. But this is mostly because some incredibly effective goals generate enormous social benefits. If we focus on only the 40 best goals, every rupee spent will deliver 21 of social benefits.

The world and India should first focus on the most effective goals. Cost-benefit analysis can help us identify the best of these promises to fulfill first.

Björn Lomborg, Bibek Debroy and Aditya Sinha are the chairpersons of the Copenhagen Consensus, respectively; Chairman of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister; and Additional Private Secretary, Research, EAC-PM