Upstart: problems worth solving

In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution that set an agenda for the world to build towards a future that is sustainable. Sometime in 2016, a company called DNV GL came out with a report called ‘ Future of Spaceship Earth ’, which expressed concern that there were four of these 17 goals for 2030 that humanity seemed all set to completely miss — “reduced inequalities”, “responsible consumption and production”, “climate action”, and “life below water”. As a follow-up to that report, another UN body, the United Nations Global Compact, along with an advisory group called Sustainia, worked on the DNV GL report to point out how there were a lot of entrepreneurship and business opportunities in those four goals, and how startups could thus help humanity shore up and catch up with the targets of SDG’s 2030 agenda. The first of these four goals, reducing inequalities, or specifically reducing income equality within a country, is something that is very important to India as well — in fact, to me, this is a key lever that will help India achieve many of the other SDGs, such as “no poverty”, “zero hunger”, “good health and well-being”, and a few more. A decentralised ledger on a blockchain sounds like an ideal solution, but equally impractical, and makes the mistake of trying to use a ‘one size fits all’ solution for what actually is many different interlinked problems.