Sustainable Development Goals: Tracing Social Media’s Tamil Citizen Voices in Indian context

Abstract

As per Human Development Index of 2019 report, India is in the 129th rank. Nearly 28% of the Indian population lives below the poverty line. As per another report from The Lancet journal on healthcare index, India is in 154th position among the 195 countries. According to India’s Annual Status of Education Report 2017, 14% of children in the age group of 14-18 are not enrolled in any school system. Education, health and living standards are the primary factors to measure the quality of life in any social settings. Giving this grim view of social conditions in India, the role of public institutions as well as individual members’ are crucial in lending adequate support to the society to enhance the standings of living conditions. According to a study published in 2011, only 2% of news space were being given to the issues pertinent to development by the leading Indian national newspapers. Many news stories in these 2%, might have appeared due to 'Coups and earthquakes syndrome’ type of events that contained news values of death, disease and disaster. From the perspective of Sustainable Development Goals, the participatory approach of individuals is more meaningful in order to achieve the stated 17 goals as well as 169 targets. Apart from the government’s initiative for the SDGs and substantial fundings from the donor agencies, awareness about the SDGs is essential and ideal for the bottom-up approach towards achieving the development goals and its targets by 2030. In this respect, with the help of twitteR package of and text mining tools of R programming, citizen’s voice was measured for those keywords and its equivalent hashtags which were appeared in June 2018. English is being the elite language in India, one regional language Tamil would be included to compare the non-English private sphere with regard to SDGs in Indian context.