Inclusive Growth – What is so exclusive about it?

In the wake of the economic reform programme undertaken since 1991, distributional issues
have received considerable attention and policy concern. In pursuit of such concerns, the
government has worked out an approach to the Eleventh Five Year Plan, which lays
emphasis on, though without defining, a strategy of inclusive growth. In fact, this form of
pursuit of inclusive growth has become virtually a universal concern with even the UNDP
harping on it without knowing answers for what it calls a million dollar question- what
inclusive growth is and how to achieve it? This paper proposes to define inclusion/exclusion
for an outcome scenario on broad based growth from three different perspectives, viz.,
production, income, and consumption distribution. It also provides some illustrations based
on the National Accounts Statistics and the National Sample Survey consumer expenditure
distributions for the year 2004-05.