India oppose replacing of MDGs with sustainable development goals

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is expected to attend Rio conference in June to finalise UN proposal.

Updated on: Jan 18, 2012, 24:22:18 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The United Nations has proposed replacing Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015 with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which could have norms for green economy, energy efficiency energy appliances, water efficiency, protecting endangered species such as tigers and whales.

A zero draft circulated by UN is expected to be finalised in June in Rio, Brazil, where over 100 head of states including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh are likely to participate in an Earth Summit.

Although India's concerns regarding carbon tax and technology dependence on the developed world has found place in the zero text many issues raised by India are missing.

India negotiators, who will discuss the text thrice before, PM Singh and others deliberate, say that there was unanimity of setting up a Sustainable Development Council in UN but many other issues remain to be worked out.

The SDGs targets on range of issues including reducing emission for per unit of GDP, preserving bio-diversity, provide quality education, ensure food and clean drinking water to all and gender equality would be applicable after 2015 will have to be met by 2030. The nations will decide these targets between 2012 and 2015 and also setup a mechanism to monitor the progress.

The developed and the developing world are already at loggerheads over the UN’s 128 page draft called ‘The Future We Want’, which seeks major policy shifts to meet the proposed goals with some financial assistance from the rich nations.

The UN has incorporated some elements of the position taken by India and other developing countries such as that green economy should not result in creation of new green barriers such as carbon tax, impose new conditions on aid and finance and increase dependence of the developed countries on rich nations for cleaner technologies.

What remains missing from the UN draft is India’s strong opposition to defining and aiming for quantitative targets towards sustainable development. India believes that the target should only be for the developed world and not the developing world, which has to deal with poverty eradication and providing livelihood avenues to its large deprived population.

“We are against mandatory SDGs for all nations,” said a senior government official. India believes that the principles of Rio summit in 1992 clearly say that rich nations have obligation to reduce global poverty and achieve sustainable development goals. The developing countries have to take voluntary actions depending on their domestic resources to meet the “aspirational” target.

Considering the clamour expected before the Rio conference, environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan will be calling a meeting of officials from different government departments to discuss the strategy for first round of negotiations on zero draft starting from January 25 at UN headquarters in New York.

After January, there would be two more rounds of officials negotiations before ministers discuss a draft for consideration of head of states meeting in Rio from June 20 to 22. Government said PM Singh is expected to visit attend the conference after attending a meeting of G20 nations in Mexico on 18th and 19th June.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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