On December 1, 2022, India assumed the Presidency of the Group of 20 (G-20). The G-20 represents 19 major economies and the European Union, accounting for 85 per cent of global GDP, over 75 per cent of global trade, and about two thirds of the global population.
The theme of India’s G-20 Presidency is One Earth, One Family, One Future, also encapsulated in Sanskrit by the phrase Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam. India’s holistic interdependent approach to global issues emphasises effective and equitable global cooperation. By the time the G-20 Summit is held in India over September 9-10, 2023, about 200 meetings of the G-20 will have been hosted in over 50 cities in India, to carry forward the G-20 work plan across 32 different work streams. This provides a large canvas for global cooperation.
India’s six declared priorities as G-20 President are: climate change including climate action; inclusive and resilient growth; acceleration of progress on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); technological transformation and digital public infrastructure; women-led development; and reformed multilateralism.
India’s endeavour is to make G-20 activities “human-centric”, with G-20 meetings held in India so far emphasising the participation of all relevant stakeholders, including large numbers of youth. The G-20 Bali Summit held in November 2022 reiterated that the G-20 remains “the premier forum for global economic cooperation”. India’s Presidency of the G-20 has consciously focused on greater global cooperation within this economic framework.
The main challenges for global cooperation today come from the impact of armed conflicts and unprecedented disruptions – like the Covid-19 pandemic – on socio-economic development. Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represents the only universal framework for global socio-economic development. Two statistics illustrate the current grave human-centric dimension of the challenges facing Agenda 2030.
According to the UN, about 60 million people worldwide were victims of armed conflicts when Agenda 2030 was adopted unanimously in September 2015. By 2022, that figure had risen sharply to 324 million people. In 2015, according to the World Bank, about 700 million people, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, were living below the poverty line. By 2022, about 685 million people across the world were below the poverty line, with as many as 150 million, mainly in developing countries, pulled below the poverty line by the Covid-19 pandemic. The report underlined that global inequality had risen for the first time in decades, with income losses of the world’s poorest people being twice as high as income losses of the world’s richest.
In response, the priority for India’s G-20 Presidency has been to revive the momentum of global cooperation needed to achieve Agenda 2030 by its deadline of December 31, 2030. The identified SDGs subsume the six priorities identified by India during its Presidency. In the six areas that India has identified as its priorities, national initiatives taken by India have been shared with other G-20 countries, especially developing countries. Thus, India’s credentials for pushing greater global cooperation within the G-20, have strong foundations.
Reformed multilateralism
The Preamble of Agenda 2030 underscored that “there can be no sustainable development without peace, and no peace without sustainable development”. India has taken the lead to implement this by pointing out that “this is not an era of war”. However, the ineffectiveness of existing multilateral institutions to ensure peace, security and development has highlighted calls for “reformed multilateralism”.
The G-20 will need to give a major push to reform multilateral institutions like the UN and its Security Council, responsible under the UN Charter for maintaining international peace and security (where reforms mandated unanimously by world leaders in 2005 continue to be blocked by the five permanent members of the Security Council); the International Monetary Fund/World Bank, mandated by their Articles of Agreement to ensure global financial coordination for international reconstruction and development (where IMF quota and governance reforms agreed to in 2010 remain unimplemented till now, due to delaying tactics by developed countries); and the World Trade Organisation, created to ensure the primacy of multilaterally-agreed trade rules based on non-discrimination (where reforms to enhance the Organisation’s integrity and effectiveness are being exploited since 2016 by the growing recourse of developed countries to unilateralism and protectionism).
When India assumed the Presidency of the G-20 at the November 2022 Bali Summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that India’s “G-20 priorities will be shaped in consultation with not just our G-20 partners, but also our fellow travellers in the Global South, whose voice often goes unheard”. Over January 12-13, 2023, India hosted a virtual Voice of the Global South for Human-centric Development Summit. A measure of the importance of India’s initiative can be gauged from the fact 125 countries responded to this initiative, including 47 from Africa, 31 from Asia, 29 from Latin America and the Caribbean, 11 from Oceania, and seven from Europe. On March 27, 2023, developing countries in the UN voted overwhelmingly to adopt a solution opposing unilateral sanctions due to their “extra-territorial” nature and adverse impact on the “right to development”.
The deliberations of the G-20 under India’s Presidency will be carried forward through two processes. Within the G-20, three major developing countries (India, Brazil and South Africa) will lead the G-20 during 2023-2025, creating a three-year window for implementing the priorities of the Global South. Outside the G-20, ongoing processes to enhance international cooperation will culminate in the UN’s SDG Summit in September 2023, followed by the UN’s Summit of the Future in 2024. These Summits are expected to result in the call for a General Conference to review the UN Charter, as recommended in April 2023 by the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism, to coincide with the UN’s 80th anniversary Summit in 2025.
This represents a golden opportunity for India’s G-20 Presidency in consolidating a “human-centric” sustainable development paradigm, which will restore popular support for the principle of international cooperation, upholding the functioning of the “world as one family”.
[Ambassador (Retd.) Asoke Mukerji is Distinguished Fellow, Vivekananda International Foundation, New Delhi]