Sustainable Development Goals will be very powerful tool to measure development: JK Chief Secretary

Jammu (Jammu and Kashmir) December 10 : Jammu and Kashmir Chief Secretary Arun Kumar Mehta on Friday said that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be a very powerful tool to measure development in general and sustainable development in particular, and added that the governments have to measure development to improve further.
The Chief Secretary stated it while chairing the workshop on Sustainable Development Goals and delivering the keynote address, he said, "If we do not measure development, we do not improve. If we do not measure with consistency, it is just anecdotal. The SDG tool will be a very powerful tool to measure development in general and sustainable development in particular".
Mehta also exhorted the departments to utilize the SDG mechanism to chart a plan till 2030.
He further reiterated that Jammu and Kashmir is the front runner in implementing several schemes and programmes and is also close to saturating several other schemes.
"Apart from this, Jammu and Kashmir is first among many States and Union Territories in achieving aspirational districts, aspirational towns, aspirational blocks and aspirational Panchayats. Jammu and Kashmir is the only one in the entire country to tread this developmental path. There is another set of measures which include Panchayat Development Index, Block Development Index and City Development Index parallel to these. We also have a third element in the shape of 1250 Deliverables through which we are rating and fastracking achievement of different government schemes and welfare measures," he added.
The Planning Development and Monitoring Department (PD&MD), Government of Jammu and Kashmir organized a UT-wide workshop on Sustainable Development Goals for Jammu Kashmir here on Friday.
The consultation was organized in collaboration with NITI Aayog, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
The UT-wide consultation saw participation from senior officials of all departments of Jammu and Kashmir and included speakers and experts from Union Ministries, State Governments and UNDP.
The Sustainable Development Goals or the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development is a global consensus signed by India and 190 plus countries of the world in 2015.
It includes 17 Goals and 169 global targets, which cut across social, economic and environmental dimensions. In India, NITI Aayog, in close coordination with MoSPI, monitors the progress on the global goals at the national as well as at the level of States and Union Territories. The SDGs have brought the focus on development-related outcomes and not just financial expenditure and physical progress.
This workshop was held at the heels of a new partnership between the UT and NITI Aayog. The UT of Jammu and Kashmir and NITI Aayog, in technical partnership with UNDP, have entered into an agreement to establish a Sustainable Development Goals Coordination Centre (SDGCC) at the Planning, Development & Monitoring Department.
This partnership will seek to strengthen the monitoring system of the state, derive actionable insights from data analytics, promote gap-based targeting and build capacities.
The consultation in Jammu included sessions by NITI Aayog on the Indian model of SDG localisation, national and UT indicator framework by MoSPI, sharing of best practices on the adoption of the SDG framework by Gujarat, Uttarakhand, Haryana and Punjab, and on aligning budgets to SDGs.
Detailed discussions and deliberations on the UT's progress in adopting the SDGs, the progress and achievement pertaining to the goals and charting the way forward were the central themes across all sessions.
Every session was followed by a question and answer session where participants gave their suggestions and feedback to the speakers.
Secretary, PD&MD briefed the gathering that Jammu and Kashmir has been a frontrunner UT scoring better than many States and UTs in the majority of sectors like health, agriculture production, education, renewable energy, providing civic amenities, enhancing forest cover, and ensuring gender equality, especially during the last two years.