By Jay Prakash Pandey “Pahadi”
It would be a mistake to treat the recent G20 summit in Johannesburg as just another crowded multilateral photo-op. For the first time, the forum sat on African soil; the African Union had a permanent seat at the table; and in that setting India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, placed six new global initiatives before the leaders. It was diplomacy, yes but it was also a quiet attempt to redraw the moral and political vocabulary of global governance.
The G20 itself was born in 1999, out of the Asian financial crisis. At the beginning it was little more than a coordination platform for finance ministers and central bank governors. Only after the 2008 global financial crisis did it graduate to a leaders’ summit. Today, with the European Union and now the African Union as members, the G20 together represents around 85 per cent of the world’s GDP and more than three-quarters of global trade. From such a grouping, the world expects not only better economic management but also some coherence of purpose, a sense of where humanity wants to go.
In Johannesburg, Modi chose “human-centred development” as the thread running through his interventions. The phrase has been floating in international debates for some time, but in India’s political–philosophical tradition it resonates with the idea of integral humanism where the individual, society and nature are seen as a single, interlinked canvas. The question was posed quite bluntly: if a country’s GDP is rising, but the climate crisis is deepening, inequality widening, and the weakest communities slipping further behind, can we honestly call that “development”?
It is from this backdrop that the first proposal emerges: a G20 Global Traditional Knowledge Repository. Every region of the world carries, in its memory, techniques for living with risk, ways of harvesting water, coping with droughts and landslides, managing forests, conserving seeds and crop diversity, keeping millets and coarse grains alive, practising folk medicine and yoga-like systems of body–mind care. In the race for modernisation, much of this has either been ignored or trapped inside the narrow walls of corporate patents.
The idea of a global repository is to document this wisdom systematically so that climate policy, health systems and livelihood programmes are not designed only in laboratories, but also in dialogue with what communities have learnt over centuries. But the proposal also raises an uncomfortable and necessary question: who owns this knowledge? The State? Or the communities and tribes who have carried it, often without recognition, across generations?
A second strand of India’s pitch speaks directly to Africa: the G20 Africa Skills Multiplier. Africa is the youngest continent on the planet. Its youth could power a new century or, if left without skills and opportunities, become the source of deep social unrest. India’s suggestion is that G20 countries should work together to train a critical mass of one million trainers in Africa, who in turn can equip millions of young people with skills that make sense in their local economies.
This is not the old language of “aid” or charity. It is an attempt at least in intent to look at Africa not as a resource pit or a dumping ground for finished goods, but as a partner with equal dignity. The symbolism is important, especially after the Delhi G20 summit where India played a central role in securing permanent G20 membership for the African Union.
The third initiative, a G20 Global Healthcare Response Team, is a direct response to the brutal lessons of Covid-19. The pandemic made visible what many had been saying for years: global health systems are profoundly unequal. Some countries sat on surplus vaccines and unused equipment; others struggled for oxygen cylinders and basic hospital beds.
India’s proposal is for a standing team of experts from G20 countries, doctors, epidemiologists, logisticians who can be activated whenever the world faces a health emergency: a fresh pandemic, climate-induced heatwaves, disease outbreaks after floods, or largescale malnutrition. The underlying message is clear: in the 21st century, health is no longer just a national responsibility; it is a shared, planetary obligation.
The G20 Open Satellite Data Partnership takes the debate into the realm of technology and justice. Today, satellite data shapes almost everything – weather forecasts, sowing dates for farmers, safety advisories for fishermen, early warnings for coastal erosion, urban planning, flood prediction. Yet the raw data and its refined products are largely controlled by a handful of countries and agencies.
India’s suggestion is that the space agencies of G20 members should build a framework to share critical satellite data on weather, oceans, agriculture and disaster risk with developing countries, particularly those in the “Global South”, in a timely and user-friendly form. If this becomes real, the beneficiaries will not be abstract “states” alone; they will be the small farmer deciding when to sow, the fishing community judging whether to venture into the sea, the coastal village planning its response to a cyclone.
The fifth proposal, the G20 Critical Minerals Circularity Initiative, turns the spotlight on a tension that lies hidden inside the green transition. The world wants to move away from fossil fuels. To do that, we need batteries, solar panels and electric vehicles each of which depends on lithium, cobalt, nickel and other rare minerals. Many of these lie under the same African, South American and Asian soils that have already endured centuries of colonial extraction.
Circularity, in this context, means refusing the old habit of simply opening new mines and walking away from the damage. It means giving priority to recycling, urban mining and second-life use of batteries, so that the same material serves multiple life-cycles and the pressure on land and communities is reduced. But achieving this will demand behavioural change at all three levels: industry, governments and consumers.
The sixth initiative, the G20 Initiative on Countering the Drug–Terror Nexus, marks a shift in the language of security. India has, for years, argued that cross-border narcotics networks and terror financing reinforce each other. Today, the synthetic drugs and opioid crises have begun to tear into Western societies as well.
If the G20 can agree on a shared framework in this space combining financial tracking, border cooperation, intelligence sharing and public-health-based rehabilitation—it would broaden our understanding of security. It would no longer be seen only through guns, fences and police action, but also through the stability of families, streets and neighbourhoods.
Alongside these six initiatives, Modi underlined two larger themes. The first is the need to pull disaster risk out of the narrow corner of “relief and response” and place it at the heart of development planning. Under India’s G20 presidency, a Disaster Risk Reduction Working Group and the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) have both tried to push this idea. Roads, cities, bridges, power lines, agriculture all of these, he argued, must be designed with future cyclones, floods, earthquakes and heatwaves already in mind. In Johannesburg, he again appealed to richer nations to share technology and finance in this area more generously with developing countries.
The second theme brought together food security and the climate crisis. Drawing on India’s own experience its public distribution system, free ration schemes, Ayushman Bharat, crop insurance and the promotion of millets or “Shri Anna”, India put forward what has begun to be talked about as the Deccan Principles on Food Security. The core idea is simple but radical: hunger, nutrition and climate risk should not be treated as three separate files; they are one intertwined challenge and must be addressed as such.
For the outside world, these announcements are signals of India’s evolving role. But they also function as a mirror for us at home. When we speak of a global repository of traditional knowledge, we must also ask how seriously we, within India, listen to Adivasi and rural communities; how we protect their rights over forests, seeds and medicinal plants; how fairly we share benefits if this knowledge is commercialised.
When we imagine a skills revolution for African youth, it is fair to ask what we have done for our own ITI graduates, polytechnic students and the young men and women in the informal sector who repair machines, weld iron, run small workshops and keep our towns functioning.
And when we campaign against the global drug–terror nexus, we cannot ignore the creeping spread of narcotics in our own cities and hill towns. Are our policies clear, consistent and humane enough to deal with addiction at home?
Yet, even with these questions, one fact is worth recording. On the G20 stage, India did not confine itself to the familiar role of the aggrieved petitioner, listing historical injustices. It tried, instead, to drag the development debate away from the narrow “how much growth” towards the more unsettling questions: “growth for whom, and at what cost?” The six initiatives presented in Johannesburg are not a final blueprint for a just world order. They are, at best, a first draft -a set of proposals in which the interests of people, society and the Earth try to sit in the same paragraph.
The real test, of course, lies ahead. In the coming years, will these ideas move beyond summit declarations and glossy communiqués? Will Africa’s young people actually find new ladders of opportunity? Will small farmers and fishers genuinely access satellite information in a language and format they can use? Will the custodians of traditional knowledge receive not just polite praise but legal rights and material benefits? Will the grip of the drug–terror economy be loosened in any visible way?
If the answer to even some of these questions turns out to be “yes”, then we may one day look back and say that India did something more than deliver eloquent speeches at the G20. It tried, in its own way, to nudge the moral agenda of world politics a little further down the road.
(Jay Prakash Pandey “Pahadi” is an Independent Columnist & Writer.)
