Modi's key concerns in UN sustainable development goals

PM Modi’s initiatives like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, smart cities, cleanliness and poverty eradication are reflected in the UN sustainable development goals.

Updated on: Aug 4, 2015, 22:29:27 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India agreed to adopt specific targets under the UN’s sustainable development goals on Sunday after key themes championed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi found a mention in the document to be signed by 192 nations in September.

The PM’s major initiatives such as 'Beti Bachao Beti Padhao', Smart Cities, Cleanliness and Clean Energy have made an imprint on the 29-page declaration that also talks about poverty elimination, another core concern of his.

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“The message from the PM was clear that the goals should not create a bottleneck for India’s development and should have the country’s imprint on poverty elimination, skill development and empowering the girl child,” a senior government functionary part of the negotiations told HT. “Most of the issues raised by us have been incorporated.”

Modi will attend the UN General Assembly session where the declaration about 17 goals with 69 targets will be adopted, recognising climate change as a developmental challenge rather than a phenomenon decoupled from economic growth. That would mark a major shift from the millennium development goals 2015.

The PM is expected to elucidate India’s position on global warming at the UN summit where a commitment of heads of states for the Paris climate deal will be sought. He would elaborate how India had taken the lead in fighting climate change, sources said.

The summit would mark India’s changed position on the sustainable development goals as it had resisted having specific targets for the developing world for the best part of the three-year-long negotiations. A breakthrough came earlier this year when India’s argument for having “non-intrusive” targets in the goals found traction among rich nations.

Although the goals have been agreed upon, providing an estimated $2.5 trillion in funding to the developing world to meet them is missing in the declaration which proposes a mechanism to achieve the 169 targets agreed through a “high-level political platform” at national and global levels. It proposes a regular progress review by the UN based on data collated by countries.

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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