India wants to be on deciding panel on SDGs

In a bid to ensure that it is heard adequately, India wants to be part of a group of 30 countries on deciding the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and financing mechanism under the Rio plus 20 declaration.

Updated on: Aug 16, 2012, 20:51:39 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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In a bid to ensure that it is heard adequately, India wants to be part of a group of 30 countries on deciding the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and financing mechanism under the Rio plus 20 declaration.

Around 195 countries in June this year had agreed on a declaration at the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro on how the world should grow in a sustainable manner in the next 20 years. India was able to get equity and right of poor in development as part of the Rio declaration.

With the work in progress for the next level -- deciding the SDS and financial mechanism to achieve the goals -- India has asked the United Nations to have its representative in the working groups to prepare the draft on the two for the UN Sustainable Development Summit to take a final call.

The SDGs would replace Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which end in 2015.

A senior Indian negotiator at the Rio conference said that the two mechanisms would be the key to define how the world will grow in the next 20 years.

"We will not like the SDGs to be thrust upon us by the developed world as MDGs were," the negotiator said.

India has, therefore, sought adequate participation in the process to define the SDGs which aims to cover everything from protecting environment to food security and eradicating poverty and human suffering.

The initial draft on SDGs prepared by the UN was not acceptable to several developing countries such as India and as a result it made the UN body agree to a working group on SDGs.

But, equally important for India is the mechanism for flow of money from the rich nations to the developing countries.

"The finance mechanism will be important to meeting the SDGs," an official said, adding that the fund flow has been extremely poor during the MDG era.

India, China and other developing countries have been demanding financial assistance to adopt high cost cleaner technologies and make it affordable to people.

Rich nations are not willing to free these technologies from patents, a key demand for the government.

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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