India needs to take leadership on sustainable devpt: Experts

R K Pachauri, Director General of TERI, said India as a developing country needs to come up with its own concepts on sustainable development to motivate United Nations to keep such issues on the radar of the global community which involves both developing as well as developed countries.

"It is time India takes the lead and takes charge of the intellectual leadership of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) raised at the Summit.

"The final product at the culmination of the Rio Summit had enough substance for each community and stakeholder to pick up elements to promote the discourse of global sustainable development," he said.

Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, India's former climate negotiator, said the Rio Summit witnessed more attempts of rolling back the developments that were achieved as goals till the 1992 Summit.

"The road ahead would focus on the evolution and scope of sustainable development goals (SDGs) and their relation to the Millennium Development Goals," he said, adding that before comparing the two summits one needs to understand difference between the political contexts prevailing then and now.

Another expert Nitin Desai believes that the need of the hour is intellectual efforts for defining sustainable development and foreseeing its implications so that it does not just remains at level of concept but penetrates into areas such as sustainable production and consumption.

"The interest and participation of corporate entities and the scientific and academic communities at the Summit was far greater at the Rio Plus 20 Summit than ever before. This is so because the trend is no longer limited to green consumerism, but to green investors," he said.