Interdisciplinary Management Education and Sustainable Development: Key Insights

Interdisciplinary is one of the most popular keywords in 21st-century academia. While it is not a new notion, its significance has become more apparent in recent years. Interdisciplinary approaches offer numerous advantages in the workplace, including collaboration, communication, research, flexibility, interpersonal skills, and other multidisciplinary abilities that are highly sought after today. Education plays a key role in society and has a significant impact on a country’s overall socioeconomic growth. The sustainable development goals (SDGs) set time-bound targets for various sectors crucial to development, such as health, education, employment, sanitation, energy, infrastructure, and the environment. From a global perspective, India’s achievement of these goals is crucial. The importance of inclusion and high-quality education for all is reaffirmed.

Providing quality education for everyone emphasizes the idea that sustainable development is a proven and powerful tool in achieving education for all. This chapter aims to provide insights into the evolution of interdisciplinary concepts in management education (ME) over time. The SDGs mandate that governments ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for all children and adults, as well as lifelong learning opportunities. This, combined with providing access, aims to promote equity, inclusiveness, and sustainable education. Therefore, the objective of this chapter is to study the SDGs in the Indian context and examine how they are integrated with ME. It examines the status of goal attainment in education in India at various levels, including primary, secondary, and tertiary, and seeks to identify some of the major challenges faced by the education sector in providing quality education and addressing accessibility issues.