LocationsBy Sakshi Gupta, SDG Monitoring and Evaluation Analyst, UNDP India
Ten Years, 10 Milestones: How India Turned the SDGs into Action
September 25, 2025
The story of SDGs in India is a story about people. It is about their aspirations, their opportunities, and their resilience. Over the last ten years, the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development has guided policies and partnerships that have touched millions of lives in India.
From the very beginning, India’s leadership placed the SDGs at the heart of development planning through a whole-of-government approach, both vertically, across the three tiers of government, and horizontally, across ministries. NITI Aayog was entrusted as the anchor institution, coordinating efforts and fostering ownership across the system.
Snapshot of the SDG India Index
To trigger nationwide momentum, India pioneered the SDG India Index, a unique tool that ranks all states and union territories on their progress. By making data public and comparable, the index helped states identify their priorities and motivated them to improve through constructive competition. This spirit of data-driven action was further strengthened through the National Indicator Framework, periodically refined and adapted by states and districts, making monitoring more relevant to local realities.
Building on this momentum, the NER District SDG Index informed development planning for India’s Northeast, leading to a targeted $825 million government investment through PM-DevINE scheme. At the grassroots, more than 250,000 village councils (Gram Panchayats) began integrating SDG priorities into their local development plans through the Panchayat Advancement Index.
North Eastern Region - District SDG Index
India also made a deliberate policy choice to institutionalise the SDGs. Over a dozen states established dedicated SDG Coordination and Acceleration Centres, further embedding the goals into state-level governance. Budgets worth billions of dollars such as in Haryana and Odisha are now mapped to SDG targets.
At the same time, India pioneered new ways of tackling inequality. The Aspirational Districts Programme, later expanded to Aspirational Blocks, used data-driven governance to transform lagging regions ensuring that the SDGs are not only localised but also equitably delivered.
Beyond government, India pursued a whole-of-society approach. Civil society, academia, the private sector, and citizens all became active partners in this effort, particularly through three rounds of Voluntary National Reviews in 2017, 2020, and 2025. More than a thousand CSOs took part in nationwide consultations each year, making SDG implementation a shared national mission.
The results are visible. Over 135 million people have moved out of multidimensional poverty, proving that aligning national programmes with SDG principles can change lives at scale. And India’s commitment has extended outward too through South-South Cooperation, capacity-building, and knowledge-sharing with other developing countries.
As the world marks a decade of the 2030 Agenda, India’s experience demonstrates that when global goals are embedded in national priorities and rooted in local realities, they become instruments of transformation.
