Nagaland Chief Secretary to lead committee for monitoring SDGs

Our Reporter

Dimapur, July 18 (EMN): Nagaland has formed a high-level steering committee headed by the chief secretary for guidance, monitoring, policy review and course correction of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), according to the Northeastern Region District SDG Index – Report and Dashboard 2021-2022 published by NITI Aayog.

The Department of Planning and Coordination is the nodal department in the state. An SDG Coordination Centre has been established with the support of UNDP, while SDG cells have been established in all the related departments. The mapping of schemes with the SDGs has been done and the SDG Vision document has been prepared and published, it said.

It further reported that Nagaland has a system of reviewing the progress on SDGs through the high-level steering committee. The state has further prepared the state and district indicator frameworks, while database for SIF indicators with baseline and source as well as short, medium and long-term targets has been established.

 In order to gain an understanding of data availability at the district level, a mapping exercise was piloted in Kiphire district. In the SDG based budgeting in the state, it was reported that the government has initiated the process of developing draft guidelines and the relevant framework for the preparation of the outcome budget that will be linked to the SDGs. The government aims to encourage open, accountable, and pro-active governance by bringing to light result oriented outputs and outcomes. This effort will enable all departments to effectively keep track of the objectives of the schemes and work towards the pre-decided development goals thereby helping in achieving the state, national and global development agenda. 

In the strategies for “Leaving No One Behind”, the state has created Village Vision Cells (VVCs) with the tagline “Back to the root”, which was introduced with the objective of benefiting all the villagers.

Owing to the wide intra-state disparity, districts are emerging as the focus for intensive interventions, the report said.

“This necessitates the availability of reliable data at the district level on nationally recognised indicators. However, the availability of reliable and comparable data at the district level is a considerable challenge. This is more so in the north-eastern region of India, for which data at the state level is also not available for some of the key indicators,” it said.

The Northeastern Region District SDG Index Report and Dashboard 2021-2022, compares 120 districts from the eight northeastern states across all sectors of the SDGs.

The report maintained that the Northeastern Region District SDG Index, is a torchbearer for estimating district level  performance across key SDG targets and indicators and provides an excellent opportunity for peer learning, policy tweaking, mid-course correction, and resource allocation at the most granular level of the district.

“The fact that a composite district-level index covering 120 districts in eight states can be prepared for such a diverse region with statistical challenges and variegated statistical systems, is expected to inspire other states and UTs to prepare similar indices,” the report stated.