India rejects UN panel recommendation having Jairam Ramesh as member

India has rejected a key recommendation of a United Nations panel to replace Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which had rural development minister Jairam Ramesh as a minister. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Feb 3, 2012, 21:04:48 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India has rejected a key recommendation of a United Nations panel to replace Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which had rural development minister Jairam Ramesh as a minister.

A high level panel headed by South Africa President Jacob Zuma and Finish President Tarja Halonen submitted a report Global Sustainability released at Delhi Sustainable Development Summit on Thursday. Ramesh was among the environment ministers nominated in the panel after Copenhagen climate conference of 2009 to bring the world together on green pathway.

After deliberations close to two years, the panel had recommended that SDGs should cover all countries, just not the developing world as MDGs do. It also want that new areas such as climate change, green jobs, water, food and energy security and sustainable cities should be introduced in SDGS.

“It (SDGs) should incorporate near term benchmarks while being long-term in scope looking ahead to a deadline of perhaps 2030,” the panel said in its report.

India, which is discussing SDGs for Earth Summit in Brazil in June, called Rio plus 20, has rejected any proposal to make the goals mandatory. The prime reason was the failure of the developed countries to provide finance to meet the aspirational MDG goals resulting in the developing to provide resources to meet the goal on its own.

“The developed world created a moral pressure on us to meet the goals,” a senior government official said, while rejecting any move to have consensus of SDGs. The UN panel has suggested 10 SDGs to replace seven MDGs after 2015.

The panel also said absolute poverty dipped from 46 percent in 1990 to 27 % in 2008 but inequity still existed despite economic growth up by 75 % since 1992. As a result, there are additional 20 million people undernourished people in the world.

However, the panel’s recommendation to have a Sustainable Development Council under United Nations General Assembly has India’s support.

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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