With the declaration of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the importance of localisation principles and, consequently, the local-level institutions in implementing development policies came to the forefront. India adopted a thematic approach by condensing the seventeen goals into nine themes, to be worked upon by the local administrative units, furthering that each Village Panchayat (constitutionally known as Grama Panchayats) should select a theme in a plan year and strive towards attaining it. For the South Indian state of Kerala, with its good trajectory of decentralised governance, this localisation process of SDGs was rather smooth. In this article, we discuss the case of the best-performing Grama Panchayat (GP) in Kerala, which has identified ‘Village with Self-Sufficient Infrastructure’ as the development theme. Through qualitative research methodology, we examine how the Panchayat included projects specific to this theme in the development plans and how the implementation helped produce effects on multidimensional aspects of SDGs using the SDG Impact Assessment Tool. The case studies of different infrastructure-based projects endorse that with proper planning and implementation of such projects, the lowest tier of administration can significantly contribute to the improvement of development goals. We have delineated full fund utilisation through convergence schemes, community participation, and strong monitoring mechanisms as the factors leading the selected Panchayat to be the champion of the cause. The accomplishment exhibited by the Panchayat by integrating SDGs into the Village Development Plan through the projects on the theme of self-sufficient infrastructure can be well emulated by other local bodies across the world.

Localization is globally accepted as the strategy towards attaining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this article, we put forth the South Indian state of Kerala as a true executor of the localization of SDGs owing to her foundational framework of decentralized governance. We attempt to understand how the course of decentralization acts as a development trajectory and how it has paved the way for the effective assimilation of localization principles post-2015 by reviewing the state documents based on the framework propounded by the United Nations. We theorize that the well-established decentralization mechanism, with delegated institutions and functions thereof, encompasses overlapping mandates with the SDGs. Further, through the tools of development plan formulation, good governance, and community participation at decentralized levels, Kerala could easily adapt to localization, concocting output through innovative measures of convergence, monitoring, and incentivization carried out through the pre-existing platforms and processes. The article proves that constant and concerted efforts undertaken by Kerala through her meticulous and action-oriented decentralized system aided the localization of SDGs and provides an answer to the remarkable feat that the state has achieved through the consecutive four times achievements in the state scores of SDG India Index.