ISAS Working Papers

Inclusive growth was the over-arching objective set in India’s 11th Five-Year Plan for the period 2007-2012; and the aim of this paper is briefly to review evidence and argument about India’s progress towards realising this vision. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in his Foreword to the Plan document, wrote of the need to ensure that ‘income and employment are adequately shared by the poor and weaker sections of our society’, and there is – unfortunately - a lot of evidence suggesting that this is not happening. Rather there is evidence in support of the view that India is characterised by extensive exclusion of labour. Data from the National Sample Survey show that productive jobs are not being created at anything like the rate required for ‘inclusive growth’ to be realised, and it is possible that there is even an inverse relationship between economic growth in India, and productive employment. The agricultural economy, meanwhile, remains both inefficient and inequitable. Recent developments in India’s policies for social protection – such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme – may perhaps be understood as reflecting the failures of ‘inclusive growth’.