Aligning India's Development Trajectory with the UN Sustainable Development Goals: A Multisectoral Analysis of ESG, Policy, and Responsible Management

Abstract

India's pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) sits at the intersection of three converging pressures: a corporate sector newly obligated to disclose environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance, a public administration attempting to localize a global agenda across radically unequal states, and a civil society whose priorities do not always match the projects funded in its name. This paper draws on a decade of secondary data (2015–2025) — government indices, regulatory filings, corporate sustainability reports, and peer-reviewed literature — to examine how far India's ESG architecture has actually moved the needle on the SDGs, rather than simply generating the appearance of movement. The analysis is organized around three tensions that recur throughout the evidence: the gap between disclosure mandates and disclosure quality, the gap between aggregate corporate social responsibility (CSR) spending and the needs communities actually report, and the gap between national averages and the state-level realities they obscure. State-level case material from Kerala, Himachal Pradesh, and Odisha is used to ground these tensions in specific policy and institutional contexts. The paper concludes that India's ESG framework has succeeded in making corporate behavior more visible without yet making it more accountable, and it proposes a set of institutional, financial, and community-level reforms — anchored in the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) — intended to close that gap before 2030.