NITI-Aayog, the national institute for transforming India, is keen to work with planning departments of the States across the country because of its reach to the districts and beyond for implementing and monitoring the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of inclusive growth with reduced inequalities.
Vice-chairman Rajiv Kumar on Wednesday called for an ‘organic linkage’ of the Centre and States with the NITI-Aayog for working towards taking up the projects required and said a dashboard will be installed indicating the works initiated and their progress.
He was speaking at an international conference on ‘Implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ organised by ASCI and German Development Institute (GDI).
An effort is being made to prepare a SDG index to capture the diversity of the country and from 310 indicators, about 62 have been identified in various fields considering the variance in literacy rates, geography, poverty rates, etc.
For SDGs to be mainstreamed, it is imperative that capacity building is taken up on a large scale with national and regional consultations “but we are at an early stage”, he admitted.
Innovations
Dr. Kumar also explained various initiatives taken to improve the scientific ecosystem like the Atal Innovation Mission through which 2,500 ‘tinkering labs’ have been started in secondary schools, 50% of them in the government schools, with 18,000 voluntary mentor-teachers from top institutes.
“We plan to scale them up to 5,000 in the next two years and 20,000 in the next five years,” he said.
About 41 Atal Incubation Centres too have been started at a cost of ₹10 crore each for connecting labs to the real world and venture capitalists. It also chose 112 backward districts of different States to bring about convergence in all the administrative functions to bring them to the national average, he added.
ASCI chairman K. Padmanabhaiah, GDI’s Wulf Reiners, Cyient chairman B.V.R. Mohan Reddy and ASCI’s Harsh Sharma also spoke on the occasion.
