Northeast SDG Index by NITI Aayog

• A milestone toward localising the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was achieved with the release of the first edition of the North Eastern Region (NER) District SDG Index Report and Dashboard 2021–22 by NITI Aayog and the Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region (M/DoNER), today.
• The NER District SDG Index& Dashboard, a collaborative effort by NITI Aayog and the Ministry of DoNER, with technical support from UNDP, is the first of its kind in the country as it focuses on the North Eastern Region, which is of critical significance to the country’s development trajectory.
• The Index measures the performance of the districts of the eight States of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura on the Sustainable Development Goals and their corresponding targets and ranks the districts based on the same.
• The index is based on NITI Aayog’s SDG India Index –the principal and official tool for monitoring progress on the SDGs at the national and State/ Union Territory levels and shares the common ethos of benchmarking performance and ranking the SDGs to foster competition among the districts.
• The index offers insights into the social, economic, and environmental status of the region and its districts in their march towards achieving the SDGs. It is a unique policy tool which has immense potential to measure district-level progress, highlight critical gaps, facilitate resource allocation, and will be a handy tool for policymakers in the eight North Eastern States, Ministry of DoNER and other Union Ministries.
• The NER District SDG Index aims at delineating progress at the district level on a basket of indicators and enhancing analytical understanding of sectoral issues as well as data gaps while assisting in designing future courses of action in the region.
• The modular nature of the index makes it a policy tool and a ready reckoner for gauging the progress of districts on the expansive set of the Global Goals, including health, education, gender, economic growth, institutions, climate change and environment, among others.

Overall results and findings

• Out of the 103 districts considered for ranking, 64 districts belonged to the Front Runner category while 39 districts were in the Performer category in the composite score and ranking of districts. All districts in Sikkim and Tripura fall in the Front Runner category and there are no districts in the Aspirant or Achiever categories.
• East Sikkim [Score 75.87] ranks first in the region followed by districts Gomati and North Tripura [Score 75.73] in the second position.
• The score for the 103 districts ranges from 53.00 in Kiphire [NL] to 75.87 in East Sikkim [SK].

Mission Karmayogi

• Dubbed the biggest bureaucratic reform initiative, the Union Cabinet 2020 approved ‘Mission Karmayogi’, a new capacity-building scheme for civil servants aimed at upgrading the post-recruitment training mechanism of the officers and employees at all levels.

• Mission Karmayogi aims to prepare Indian civil servants for the future by making them more creative, constructive, imaginative, innovative, proactive, professional, progressive, energetic, enabling, transparent and technology-enabled.
• Mission Karmayogi programme will be delivered by setting up a digital platform called iGOTKarmayogi. Empowered with specific role competencies, a civil servant will be able to ensure efficient service delivery of the highest quality standards, the government said.
• The platform will act as a launchpad for the National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building (NPCSCB), which will enable a comprehensive reform of the capacity building apparatus at the individual, institutional and process levels.
• NPCSCB will be governed by the Prime Minister’s Human Resource Council, which will also include state Chief Ministers, Union Cabinet ministers and experts. This council will approve and review civil service capacity-building programmes.
• Besides this, there will be a Cabinet Secretary Coordination Unit comprising select secretaries and cadre controlling authorities.
• Also, there will be a Capacity Building Commission, which will include experts in related fields and global professionals. This commission will prepare and monitor annual capacity-building plans and audit human resources available in the government.
• Finally, there will be a wholly-owned Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), which will govern the iGOT-Karmayogi platform. It will be set up under Section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013.
• The SPV will be a “not-for-profit” company and will own and manage iGOT-Karmayogi platform. The SPV will create and operationalise the content, market place and manage key business services of the iGOT-Karmayogi platform, relating to content validation, independent proctored assessments and telemetry data availability. The SPV will own all Intellectual Property Rights on behalf of the Government of India.
• How will it be funded? To cover around 46 lakh central employees, a sum of Rs 510.86 crore will be spent over a period of 5 years from 2020-21 to 2024-25. The expenditure is partly funded by multilateral assistance to the tune of $50 million.
• Besides the setting up of the SPV, an appropriate monitoring and evaluation framework will also be put in place for the performance evaluation of all users of the iGOT-Karmayogi platform so as to generate a dashboard view of Key Performance Indicators.
• This exercise will “radically” improve the government’s human resource management practices and asserted it will use state-of-the-art infrastructure to augment the capacity of civil servants.
• Officers and employees in the government will get an opportunity to improve their performance under the Mission Karmayogi.