India's climb to 94th place in the 2026 global UN SDG Index caps a multi-year trajectory visible across recent editions of the Sustainable Development Report. India ranked 120th in 2021, then slipped slightly to 121st in 2022, before improving to 112th in 2023, and 109th in 2024, with a score of 63.99 that year out of 166 countries ranked, ahead of its 2026 jump to 94th out of 167 countries with a score of 68.3.

This global ranking, prepared by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), is distinct from India's own separate, domestic SDG India Index, developed by NITI Aayog with technical support from the United Nations in India. Rather than ranking India against other countries, the SDG India Index instead ranks India's own states and union territories against one another, using 113 indicators spanning 16 of the Sustainable Development Goals. Launched in 2018 with a baseline composite score of around 57, India's domestic SDG India Index score rose to 66 in the 2020-21 edition and further to 71 in the 2023-24 edition, its most recent edition at the time of writing.

India is recognised as the first country in the world to develop a government-led, sub-national measure of SDG progress, distinguishing this domestic index from the SDSN's purely country-level global comparison.