SDG India Index: A Monitoring Framework for SDGs

The practice targets and impacts all 36 State Governments and Union Territory Administrations covering the whole of the country.

The practice has shaken up conventional perception about development as many subnational governments hitherto seen as advanced have slid down considerably in the performance ranking. Almost all subnational governments have begun rethinking and rejigging their programme strategies, implementation and monitoring processes. As envisaged, the competitive ethos among the State Governments and Union Territory Administrations has been reinforced. It has also foregrounded the 2030 Agenda and promoted its mainstreaming across various development sectors.

The Monitoring system and the on-line Dashboard, in the public domain, has become a powerful instrument for sub-national governments, academia, policy makers, and public at large to assess the performance of their governments in various sectors of SDGs, learn from the best practices of relatively better performing units, and also allocate resources in Goal areas for sharper focus.

For the first time, such a comprehensive ranking of Government performance has been done in the country. This is the first time that any country has developed a performance monitoring mechanism to measure progress on SDG Targets going down to the sub-national level. It has gone far beyond the formal government channels and freely involved various stakeholders, who have influenced decisions with regard to methodology adopted, contents generated and analyses given out. The SDG India Index was widely debated and discussed in media and garnered editorials from leading and influential newspapers. This has created a buzz and strengthened accountability of the Government both at national and subnational levels.

The project is breaking down silos at multiple levels, between the Central and State Governments, between the Sub-national governments themselves, and also among the Governments and the Civil Society and Business Sectors. State/UT Governments are relating to and learning from each other. Given that performance in different sectors is interpenetrated to produce outcomes, inter-departmental dialogue and action structures/processes have been stimulated. Instead of going on the defensive, subnational governments have sprung into action to review and revise implementation, review and monitoring mechanisms. Since it is leading to changes in the modes of functioning, the results are likely to be lasting. These changes will improve development outputs on the ground and positively impact people’s lives. It certainly helps refocus the outreach strategies embedded in government programmes and improve service delivery to the people affected by different exclusionary processes. It is replicable in other regions and also scalable to varying contexts.