No villages in India achieved SDGs as of 2021, study estimates

New Delhi: As of 2021, none of India's villages had achieved multiple sustainable development goals (SDGs), including access to basic services, health insurance coverage and women's bank account ownership, research published in The Lancet Regional Health Southeast Asia journal shows.

However, almost all the villages had achieved the target for adolescent pregnancy among girls aged 10-14, an international team of researchers, including those from Harvard University's School of Public Health and Dhirubhai Ambani International School in Mumbai, found.

Seventeen SDGs were adopted by the United Nations in 2015 as a universal call to act towards ending poverty, protecting the planet and ensuring that all people enjoy peace and prosperity by 2030.


Monitoring of SDGs at the national and district-level can obscure inequalities at finer geographic locations, such as villages, they said.

The team added that while villages are central to service delivery and local governance, village-level estimates remain limited. They analysed data from the National Family Health Survey 2019-21 and the 2011 Census.

"As of 2021, none of the villages had achieved several SDG targets, including health insurance coverage, access to basic services, women's bank account ownership, and internet use," the authors wrote.

"In contrast, 99.9 per cent of villages had achieved the target for adolescent pregnancy among girls aged 10-14 years," they said.

The team said the analysis is a comprehensive one, providing village-level estimates of SDG indicators based on population health and social determinants across nearly 600,000 rural villages in India.

Village-level estimates ranged from 0.14 to 78.82 per cent for multidimensional poverty, 1.67 per cent to 94 per cent for health insurance coverage among men, and 6.58 per cent to 92.93 per cent in the aspect of internet use.

Nearly all villages had already reached the target for adolescent pregnancy among girls aged 10-14 years (99.9 per cent), whereas substantial proportions had also reached targets for tobacco use among women (69.1 per cent), multidimensional poverty (33.6 per cent), and improved water (32.4 per cent), the study found.

In contrast, none of the villages had yet reached targets for several indicators, including health insurance coverage, access to basic services, mobile phone ownership, clean fuel for cooking, full vaccination coverage, internet use, and partner-violence indicators, it found.

Prior studies from India were limited to either a single SDG domain, such as universal health coverage or violence against women, or were conducted at the state or district level, they said.

The authors found substantial variation within a district and between villages, and a large acceleration across villages required to meet SDG targets by 2030, suggesting that uniform district-wide strategies could be insufficient.

The estimates provide a useful baseline for understanding local variation in SDG-related outcomes and for informing future efforts to strengthen subnational monitoring and planning, they said.

The team added that addressing the gaps will require stronger local data and monitoring systems capable of tracking progress, sustaining gains where targets have already been achieved, and identifying communities at risk of being left behind.