Jan-Jun (2025)

From Growth to Inclusive Development: State, Society and the Changing Development Paradigm in India

Javed Iqbal Tramboo

Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Govt. Degree College, Doda, J&K, India

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Keywords: Inclusive growth; economic development; India; poverty; Human Development Index; income inequality; NITI Aayog; multidimensional poverty.
For much of its post-independence history, India's development strategy was organised around a single, overriding objective: raising the rate of growth of national income. The underlying premise was that a rising tide would, sooner or later, lift all boats, and that redistribution could be deferred until a sufficiently large economic surplus had been generated. Three decades after the 1991 liberalisation, that premise looks increasingly threadbare. India is today the world's fifth-largest economy and among its fastest-growing large economies, yet it continues to be home to a substantial share of the world's poor, a highly skewed distribution of wealth, and wide disparities across states, castes, genders and rural-urban divides. This paper traces the conceptual shift from a narrow, output-centred notion of economic growth to a broader, capability- and opportunity-centred notion of inclusive growth, and examines how this shift has played out in Indian policy since the early 1990s. Using secondary data drawn from the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, the Reserve Bank of India, NITI Aayog, the United Nations Development Programme and independent research bodies, the paper documents trends in GDP growth, sectoral transformation, poverty, human development, financial inclusion and inequality between the early 1990s and 2023. It finds that India has made genuine and measurable progress in reducing absolute deprivation most strikingly, roughly 135 million people are estimated to have exited multidimensional poverty between 2015-16 and 2019-21 even as the concentration of income and wealth at the very top of the distribution has intensified. The paper argues that inclusive growth in India is best understood not as a rejection of growth but as a reorientation of its purpose: growth remains necessary, but it is no longer treated as sufficient.


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Published: 30 JUN 2025

Issue: Jan-Jun (2025)

Section: Articles

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