Next week, as world leaders starting with President Obama perform their annual ritual of addressing the United Nations General Assembly, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi won’t be there. That’s because he will already have spoken to the world from the same podium the previous Friday (today, as I write). But rather than the usual rhetoric about world peace, and the familiar list of issues that feature in every world leader’s grab bag, Mr Modi spoke at the pre-Assembly meeting convened to endorse the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – the successor to the Millennium Development Goals, which have reached the target date of 2015 only partially fulfilled.
The SDGs are an intimidatingly long list of targets for social and economic development – 17 of them, with 169 sub-goals laying out specific indicators to be achieved by developing countries. They span a wide range of human need and, if fulfilled, could transform the lives of a majority of human beings on the planet. The British charity Save the Children has already, with pardonable hyperbole, declared they would save 6500 lives a day. They are certainly worth adopting and worth pursuing, for the next fifteen years till 2030, at which point a fresh round of global development aspirations will no doubt be adopted.