At 11:45 am on September 25, the United Nations General Assembly president Mogens Lykketoft gavelled in the new Sustainable Development Goals, heralding a big win for women in 193 countries that adopted the goals. Never before on a global platform had gender equality been recognised as being so central to a global agenda for development.

The Millennium Development Goals has a single goal of promoting gender equality and a single target of eliminating gender disparity in education. The Sustainable Development Goals, while not comprehensive, are much more aggressive. Its standalone fifth goal is to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”. There are nine targets under this goal – ending all forms of discrimination, violence, forced marriage and female genital mutilation to ensuring the full participation of women in political, economic and public life.

Besides these, there are gender-related targets in the goals on poverty, food security, health, education, sanitation, employment, reducing inequalities, peace and justice, and means of implementation.

Deciding indicators

The groundwork for the SDG template is not over. The indicators for progress to achieve each goal and target are being still decided. The indicators will be essential for actual empowerment of all women and girls by 2030 as opposed to a perceived improvement.

For example, one indicator for the SDG target 5.4 on valuing domestic work might be a calculation of the average weekly hours spent on unpaid care and domestic work by age, sex and location. Unpaid work refers to upkeep of a house, collecting water or food or fuel and subsistence production of goods.

Indira Hirway, professor of economics at the Centre for Development Alternatives in Hyderabad proposes that this goal requires indicators on four parameters – periodical time-use surveys to recognise such work, monetary value for unpaid work, social protection for unpaid workers, and progress on sharing unpaid work between men and women.

Groups like Resurj, a global alliance of young feminists, are batting for indicators on sexual and reproductive health, like having comprehensive sexual education and elaborating on causes of maternal mortality instead of only counting the number of deaths.

“In having 17 goals, it is good to see how women and girls are represented across them but I also have a fear that it might let countries to pick and choose or take their own time to implement some of these,” said Marisa Viana, executive coordinator of the Resurj network.

The Sustainable Development Goals are heartening in the long-overdue attention they bestow on half the world’s population. It is also abundantly clear that the world will not achieve its goals on gender or otherwise without at least moderate success in India, which is projected to be the world’s most populated country in 2030.

India must localise the 2030 agenda “in the states, in the cities and the new smart cities, in rural settings, and in every space, gender must be prioritised,” said Lakshmi Puri, deputy executive director of UN Women.

Where's the money?

The big question is where the resources will come from. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao scheme with much fanfare for which Finance Minister Arun Jaitley allotted Rs 100 crore in the annual budget. Early analysis of the scheme shows that the money isn’t reaching targets of the scheme like rural health centres. At the same time, Jaitley’s budget cut the allocation to the Ministry of Women and Child Development by half.

The Centre for Budget looked at the fineprint of gender budgeting in the union budget and found that it reflected a reduced priority for women. The budget was restructured for an increased fiscal devolution to the states. But in the restructuring it became clear that the burden of social sector schemes and those to help the socially disadvantaged is being pushed to the states. "It is important to note that the allocation of resources to these schemes by states would depend on the prioritisation for these by the states," the report says.


Allocation to schemes meant exclusively for women (Part A of Gender Budget Statement)


The report also showed that most interventions meant specifically for women were meagerly funded. Only three schemes had allocations of more than Rs 1,000 crore, while the bulk of 54 schemes had less than Rs 100 crore each. The government's plan of establishing One Stop Crisis Centres in each district of the country can hardly be achieved on the Rs 2 crore given to it in the 2015-16 budget.


The decreased priority for women is seen in other developing countries as well. As one of the measures to counter the economic and political crisis in Brazil, President Dilma Rousseff has reshuffled her cabinet and merged many ministries. Predictably, the Brazil’s independent women’s ministry has been a casualty and has been combined with labour and social security, human rights and racial equality.

The SDGs for gender equality will remain lip service unless these trends change and the goals are back with political will and real financing.

New threat of cyberviolence

While the SDGs aim to battle old gender demons, women are also facing new world threats like cyber violence. A report by the United Nations Broadband Commission for Digital Development finds that the global pandemic of violence against women has expanded to the virtual world.

Seventy-three percent of women around the world have reported online abuse, which includes stalking and sexual harassment. In the EU, 18% of women have experienced serious Internet violence since the age of 15. In India, as in other developing countries, the trends are likely to be similar but underreported. The report cites figures from India which show that 47% of women don’t reported abuse and 18% are unaware that they have been victimised.

No mention of caste

Despite the many new threats to women and hurdles to women’s empowerment, gender equality has finally made it as a central theme in the SDG agenda. Caste discrimination, on the other hand, has been completely missed.

Goal 10 of the agenda tackles inequalities within and among countries and asks for “inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion or economic or other status”. Dalit activists say that the lofty plan of “leaving no one behind” cannot be achieved without a mention of caste in that list.

“It is not a form of discrimination that affects only the discriminated. It’s about the whole social structure, how opportunities are created, how countries move forward,” said Annie Namala, executive director at the Centre for Social Equity and Inclusion, at a protest outside the UN headquarters during the September summit. Dalit groups from South Asia had gathered there during the September summit to ask to be included in the last stage of SDG decisions – the indicators.


Like Dalits, people who have been discriminated against based on work and descent, formed one-sixth of the global population, they said. No universal agenda could be achieved by ignoring them. Lending support to the activists were parliamentarians of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

Sri Lankan parliamentarian M Thilakarajah was there to ask for representation of Indian Tamils, especially those working on the tea estates and living there in sparse ‘line rooms’. “The whole system of these people living in these line rooms should be considered and there should be indicators to show improvement,” he said.

“In my country there are 6.5 million Dalits and many are leading a subhuman life,” said Nurjahan Begum Mukta, member of the Bangladesh Parliament. “We cannot claim to be civilised countries by leaving these people deprived.”