More work needed, avoid undue haste: India on SDG indicators

India has expressed concerns over the indicators developed for monitoring the Sustainable Developments Goals, saying they seem to focus exclusively on national action and not international cooperation, and also cautioned against "undue haste" in developing the indicators.
"From India's perspective, we have consistently raised our concerns with several of the indicators throughout the Inter-Agency and Expert Group for Sustainable Development Goal Indicators (IAEG-SDG) process," India's Chief Statistician and Secretary in the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation T C A Anant said here yesterday.
Addressing a session on data and indicators for the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda at the 47th session of UN Statistical Commission, Anant said some of the concerns raised by India include that the indicators seem to go beyond the remit of target they need to be measuring and appear to editorialise about the content of target themselves.

"In some other cases, the indicators do not seem to be directly relevant to the targets they are measuring. Moreover, we are concerned that the focus of most of the indicators seems to be exclusively on national action, even in respect of those targets that are clearly meant for international cooperation," he said.
Last year, the UN Statistical Commission had created the Inter-agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators, composed of UN member-states and including regional and international agencies as observers.
The IAEG-SDGs has been tasked with developing an indicator framework for global monitoring of the post-2015 development agenda and to support its implementation.

Anant said the IAEG has been able to identify a set of 231 indicators but not all of them meet the required criteria, stressing that in India's view,it is clear that the complete set of 231 proposed indicators cannot be adopted as being at the same footing.

He said the set of SDG indicators proposed by IAEG can only be "provisional" andseveral of the indicators will need "considerable further improvement."
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Anant said that there are several indicators that seem to rely on perception surveys or opinion polls as the primary data set.
"While some such perception surveys may have been used in a few, usually developed countries, there are no internationally accepted standards or guidelines for them.

"Extending them to a universal agenda and to developing countries would require significant additional work and would also have to account for socio-cultural differences among countries. Without this, we should caution that such indicators could be overly subjective, imprecise and also prone to misuse," he said.
He stressed that while the Agenda 2030 and the SDGs are universal, they are also differentiated.
An SDG target clearly mandates that the developed nations take the lead in promoting sustainable patterns of consumption but the indicator for this target however completely neglects this dimension.
"It could be argued that this mis-focus is also political," he said.

Going forward, the IAEG would also need to carefully classify the initial indicators based on their appropriateness, relevance, data availability and methodological issues, he added.