In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution that set an agenda for the world to build towards a future that is sustainable. ‘Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’, as it was called, set out 17 clearly articulated global goals, popularly called the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs for short. And in the two-and-a-half years since, one has seen a lot of buzz around these goals, and the 169 targets within, and the diagrammatic representation of the SDGs, with their nifty iconography, has popped up in many reports.
Sometime in 2016, a company called DNV GL came out with a report called ‘ Future of Spaceship Earth ’, which expressed concern that there were four of these 17 goals for 2030 that humanity seemed all set to completely miss — “reduced inequalities”, “responsible consumption and production”, “climate action”, and “life below water”.
As a follow-up to that report, another UN body, the United Nations Global Compact, along with an advisory group called Sustainia, worked on the DNV GL report to point out how there were a lot of entrepreneurship and business opportunities in those four goals, and how startups could thus help humanity shore up and catch up with the targets of SDG’s 2030 agenda.
The first of these four goals, reducing inequalities, or specifically reducing income equality within a country, is something that is very important to India as well — in fact, to me, this is a key lever that will help India achieve many of the other SDGs, such as “no poverty”, “zero hunger”, “good health and well-being”, and a few more.
This is where UNGC and Sustainia’s report let me down a bit. They identify two key areas to work on to reduce inequality. One is land rights. In most countries with inequality, the poor have no mechanism to secure rights over the land in which they live and work. This is true for India as well. The other is removing inefficiencies in the supply chain.
There are often too many middle men nibbling away undue share in various schemes, and those at whom the schemes are targeted often get much lesser than what was due to them. This again is true for India as well. But after having done a good job in identifying the problems, the proposed solution disappoints. The report’s solution to both these problems is to move things to a blockchain. This to me sounds about as sustainable as Long Island Iced Tea Company renaming themselves as Long Island Blockchain Company.
On ground realities, both in land rights (the pun is not intended), and the related sectors of real estate and construction, the process of tendering and contracting works is quite nuanced. A decentralised ledger on a blockchain sounds like an ideal solution, but equally impractical, and makes the mistake of trying to use a ‘one size fits all’ solution for what actually is many different interlinked problems. And that is where the real potential for an entrepreneur is.
No one knows what the solution is — but there are enough problems, for enough startups to come in and start solving for. And after all, given that these startups are chasing a very important SDG, there is a lot of good karma guaranteed too, apart from good business.
In this weekly column, we discuss the startup workplace. The writer heads product and technology for an online building materials marketplace
