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Theoretical and Applied Sciences Unit, North-East Centre

Overview

Vision 2030: Theoretical and Applied Sciences Unit (TASU), North-east Centre

Background

India ratified the ‘Transforming the World: 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ at the
70th annual meeting of the UN General Assembly on 25th September 2015. Consequently, as
a member nation, India is required to adopt 17 goals (referred to as Sustainable Development
Goals or SDGs). The goals are more comprehensive than the Millennium Development Goals
(2000-15) and are interdisciplinary in nature covering economic, social and environmental
issues. The goals are required to be monitored for fifteen years i.e. till 2030 through a set of
well-defined indicators. These indicators, apart from being objective parameters to assess
accurately the state of the goals set, are also supposed to enable the countries to develop their
respective implementation strategies and allocate resources accordingly. This in turn will help
in measuring the progress towards achieving the SDGs on one hand, and will also ensure the
accountability of governments and other stakeholders to this end, on the other.

The Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation (MoSPI) is entrusted with the
responsibility of monitoring SDGs in India. Most of the SDGs are environment related,
addressing the sustainability of natural resources; for instance, the goals related to food and
agriculture, water and sanitation, human settlements, health, energy, climate change,
sustainable consumption and production, oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. It is important to
note that among the total 306 indicators, 116 indicators pertain to the environment. Baseline
year for tracking progress on each of the indicators is 2015-16.

Current developments

MoSPI has recently released two documents in this context. One of them entitled as ‘EnviStats
2019’ [1] deals with compilation of an extensive set of data on environmental indicators as laid
in the Framework for the Development of Environment Statistics (FDES 2013) and suggested
by UN Statistics Division (UNSD). The second is the first baseline report on National Indicator
Framework in the country [2]. It presents the baseline report for 2015-16. It was published in
March 2019.

Related work at the North-East Centre of ISI

Two training programmes on

1. a) ‘Economic and Environmental Statistics’ for Government Officials of NE States
during September 26 - 30, 2016, and
2. b) Official Statistics, among other topics, on ‘Environmental Statistics, & Agricultural,
Forestry, & other relevant Data available from Remote Sensing Sources’ for
Government Officials of North-Eastern States during December 11-15, 2018

and a workshop on

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