Flagship Programme

UNDP has assisted the Government of Haryana in adopting the SDG Vision 2030. The Sustainable Development Goals Coordination Centre (SDGCC) is located at the Swarna Jayanti Haryana Institute of Fiscal Management. JIHS will collaborate with these entities to prepare periodic district-intensive human and sustainable development reports, beginning with Sonipat.

Sonipat has emerged as a leading education hub with high-quality higher education institutions such as O.P. Jindal Global University, Ashoka University, and many others. JIHS can play a key role in supporting the district government to measure and monitor human and sustainable development indicators such that they can be commensurate with the economic growth parameters of the state and consistent with national and state priorities for achieving SDGs.

The District Human Development Report (HDR) for Sonipat will build a baseline for measuring human development outcomes in education, health and livelihoods. Going beyond the standard templates, the Sonipat District HDR will identify specific areas such as trends in sex ratio, maternal and child well-being, water & sanitation (WASH) and provision of essential services in rural and urban areas.

The district HDR will extract information from state and district-level databases and comb service statistics of different sections of line departments and agencies in the district. This would entail a team of experts and researchers that would work closely with the district administration to prepare the HDR with the following pillars:

• Measure the district’s outcome and service provisioning indicators with information drawn from credible official sources such as censuses (SECC and AWAS) and surveys.
• Map schemes and social development programmes underway in the district.
• Identify specific sectors and areas of intervention at district, block and local levels for further action.

HEALING is a multi-sectoral participatory action research based in the Rai industrial area of Sonipat, Haryana. With the benefits of urbanisation also come the perils of unplanned urbanisation. The Rai industrial area of Sonipat is one such example. The area has witnessed rapid, albeit unplanned, urbanisation in the last decade. There has been widespread in-migration of workers without a corresponding growth in public amenities to support this working population. On the contrary, there has been a trend of increasing commercialisation and informalisation of public services. This unplanned and random development process leads to several social and sanitary hazards.

• The rising trend of out-of-school children – India is in the phase of reaping the benefits of its demographic dividend.
• Education, we agree, is the backbone of a productive workforce. And yet, the streets of the Rai industrial area of Sonipat are scattered with children of school-going age at any time of the day.
• Water supply to the houses and drainage system is another concern. The area’s roads are choked with sewage water for 12 months of a year, raising deep concerns about health and sanitary issues.
• Health care remains precarious. Residents of the area heavily depend on informal medicines and care providers. Government facilities in the vicinity are rare and heavily underequipped. While employee state insurance cards exist for some workers, they are seldom used. And finally, the availability of over-the-counter drugs is highly prevalent.
• Solid waste management remains a problem, with minimal organised effort to manage waste regularly. This has led to encroachment of natural water bodies and further environmental issues.

Work Underway

Some baseline and scoping activities have already been conducted. A baseline survey of around three hundred households on the socio-demographic characteristics of access to basic amenities was conducted in October 2024.

The survey was also completed through several rounds of visits to the site area to meet frontline workers like school teachers, Anganwadi workers, local business com-munities, managers at the Haryana Industrial Development Corporation, Panchayat members, Employees State Insurance Officials to identify some of the key challenges, locate key facilities in the vicinity. There was also an assessment of maps over the last decade to understand the changes in the intervention area’s topogra-phy, pace, and nature of urbanisation.

• Short-term interventions (9-24 months)
  The Team will undertake several short-term interventions. Some of the proposed interventions will be the creation of learning centres for school-going children, health awareness campaigns, improving the solid waste management system and water supply system, intervening on the issue of vector-borne diseases, adolescent health, etc.
• Setting up of learning centres
  The number of out-of-school children in the neighbourhood will be identified, and the reasons for dropping out of school and joining the labour force will be ascertained. The trained volunteer team will engage with the community to enable out of school children from the community to enter the educational mainstream, work for their retention in school engagement with the school system to improve its quality and capacity building of community groups, and SMC monitors the functioning of schools.
• Identification and training of young volunteers –
  Formation of YUVAE group: A voluntary adolescent/early youth group will be formed from within the community which will function as a social asset for promoting holistic development with a focus on education, health and urban governance. The group may be called Youth Volunteers for Access to Education and Entitlements (YUVAE).
• Health Awareness Campaigns
• Sanitation and solid waste management
• Linkages with Local Government Institutions and CSOs
• Legal Aid and entitlements
• Environment-related interventions: Restoration of Lake