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.