Performance Reflections on Quality Education in Respect of SDGs: A Re-Assessment of Indian States and UTs Using TOPSIS Approach

Abstract

The success of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) has led to the initiation of Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations, earmarking a time frame of 2016–2030 for its achievement. The Sustainable Development Goals framework consists of 17 goals and 169 targets within the three broader dimensions of economic, social and environmental development. The performance evaluation of Indian states and union territories, available in SDG India Index Baseline Report, 2018, has been recently concluded by NITI Aayog. Focusing on goal 4that puts thrust on quality education, NITI Aayog has considered 7 criteria capturing targets 4.1 besides 4.c and 36 alternatives (Indian states and union territories) within a multi criteria decision making environment where criteria weights are assumed to be equal, performance calculated on the basis of simple arithmetic average theory and missing value cases not considered in their computation. This simplistic approach partially captures the effect of complex interplay between the multiple criterions. The purpose of this paper is to re-evaluate the performance of Indian states and union territories with respect to goal 4of Sustainable Development Goals, as estimated by NITI Aayog. It also aims to provide a more holistic picture on performance ranking by incorporating varying weights of criteria, as obtained from Shannon’s entropy, and replacing arithmetic average theory with a more rigorous mathematical model within the domain of multi criteria decision making. In this study Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution have been used to generate an index for ranking alternatives and all missing values have been figured from expectation maximization algorithm. As expected, rank reversal phenomenon has been observed and a very low level of convergence between ranks obtained from the proposed approach and that of NITI Aayog emerges.