Altaf Hussain Haji
As we know that the United Nations (UN) General Assembly held on September 25, 2015 adopted the document titled “Transforming our World with the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development”. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are (1) End poverty (2) Zero hunger (3) Good health and wellbeing (4) Quality education (5) Gender equality (6) Clean Water and Sanitation (7) Affordable and clean energy (8) Decent work and economic growth (9) Industry, innovation and infrastructure (10) Reduced inequalities (11) Sustainable cities and communities (12) Responsible consumption and production (13) Climate change (14) Life below water (15) Life on land (16) Peace, Justice and Strong institutions and (17) Partnerships for the goals.
India has provided strong endorsement to the SDGs, giving a considerable fillip to agenda 2030. It is widely agreed that India will play a leading role in determining the relative success or failure of the SDGs, as it is the second-most populous country in the world. The sustainable development goals is a real agenda to change the world by achieving targets by 2030.
As one person wrote: “It follows that an acceleration in the rate of change will result in an increasing need for reorganisation or restructuring. The reorganisation is usually feared because it means disturbance of the status quo, a threat to people’s vested interests in their jobs, and an upset to established ways of doing things while restructured is somehow to first step to involve in the change which seems to be implementing by sustainable Development goals.
It must be considered that there is nothing difficult to carry out, nor in doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.
Subsequent SDG agenda have confirmed the importance of the concern about the change in the world. Today, more and more administrators deal with new government regulations, new products, growth, increased competition, technological developments, and a changing workforce by implementing SGDs. In response, most government setup, Centre as well as state governments find that they must undertake moderate organizational changes. The same has happened in the Union Ministry of Statistics and Programme implementation, government of India recently issued an order to streamline and strengthen with respect to the Indian official statistics system and to bring in more synergy by integrating its administrative function within the ministry setup. The National Statistical Office (NSO) is the result of the change by existing CSO and NSSO. The name of CSO and NSSO skip for the smooth functioning of the statistical system in India. No doubt this change misunderstanding the public and lack of trust happened among peoples. There is a need for strategies to handle the situation for new renames and fame of the National Statistics Office (NSO).
As we see in the field of collection of data of various socio-economic surveys of NSO that overall population also want to change even they do not understand its implications and perceive that it might with a good cost.
On the other hand, a few organisations can be characterised as having a high level of trust between citizens, employees and managers or administrators that easily for misunderstandings to develop when change is introduced. Unless managers or administrators surface the misunderstandings and clarify them rapidly, they can lead to resistance to easily catch change initiators by surprise. It has found that many managers have quite strong feelings about participation—sometimes positive and sometimes negative. That is, some managers or administrators feel, that there should always be participation during change efforts, while others feel this is virtually always a mistake. Both attitudes can create problems for a manager or administrator which results hampered the new way of working in the setup.
When change initiators believe they do not have all the information they need to design and implement a change, or when they need the wholehearted commitment of others to do so, involving others makes very good sense. Considerable research has demonstrated that, in general, participation leads to commitment, not merely compliance. In some instances, commitment is needed for the change to be a success. Nevertheless, the participation process does have its drawbacks. Not only can it lead to a poor solution if the process is not carefully managed, but also it can be enormously time-consuming. When the change must be made immediately, it can take simply too long to involve others.
In approaching an organizational or any other change situation, managers explicitly or implicitly make strategic choices regarding the speed of the effort, the amount of preplanning, the involvement of others, and the relative emphasis they will give to different approaches. Successful change efforts seem to be those where these choices are internally consistent and fit some key situational variables.
The strategic options available to managers can be usefully thought of as existing on a continuum. At one end of the continuum, the change strategy calls for very rapid implementation, a clear plan of action, and little involvement of others. This type of strategy mows over any resistance and, at the extreme, would result in a fait accompli. At the other end of the continuum, the strategy would call for a much slower change process, a less clear plan, and involvement on the part of many people other than the change initiators.
As we know that the government of India is strongly committed to agenda 2030 including the full swing of Sustainable Development Goals. India is already taking significant strides towards the attainment of SDGs, India’s National Development Agenda outlines the measures of the government by taking issues like poverty, sustainable growth, health, nutrition, gender equality and quality education among several others. Here the statistics play an important role to know the issues. This is another strategy to know the situation. The question is here the issue that arises during the implementation of sustainable development goals. Maybe these issues are linked with sustainable development goals and targets with National statistical indicators but fail to report achievement. There are so many indicators that determine where the goals stand for and what steps or strategies should be taken to achieve targets of the prescribed goals. Further, there are so many indicators that have no statistics which results in the weakness of the targets to implement and will not able to achieve the goals well in the time frame year 2030. The government was already given the responsibility to the Union Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) in developing the National Indicator Framework (NIF) which will help in monitoring the progress of the SDGs and associated targets. Statistical indicators of National Indicator Frameworks (NIF) will be the backbone of monitoring of SDGs at the national and state level and will scientifically measure the outcomes of the policies to achieve the targets under different SDGs. The National Statistical Office (NSO) of ministry is the nodal agency for planning and facilitating the integrated development of the statistical system in the country, and to lay down norms & standards in the field of official statistics, evolving concepts, definitions, classification and methodologies of data collection, processing, and release of results etc.
The following some brief strategies may be taken into consideration to transferring the world by implementing Sustainable Development goals
- It should be first and foremost to make available data or statistics to planners and policymakers of every indicator
- Try to reduce time-lag in the dissemination of data or statistics so that better and timely result will available for better implementation of SDGs
- Improving the quality of data or statistics so that targets of SDGs will be achieved in the time frame by 2030.
- Taking-up new data sets in the emerging areas to cover every indicator of SGDs so that those can meet the aspirations of stakeholders
- The coordination with central and state statistical organizations may improve to maintain the quality of indicator and get better quality data from stakeholders
Further developing appropriate strategies to create awareness about the importance of data as well as to improve “visibility” to enhance the image of both the statistical personnel and the statistical Organizations
A policy on developing new data sets should be evolved. It should include the need for the generation of new data sets, irrespective of whether it will be done by NSO or other Departments of other ministries.
Altaf Hussain Haji, ISS, is Deputy Director General National Statistical Office, Shimla. He can be contacted at altafhh@rediffmail.com
