What are salient features of Inclusive Growth?

The growth is inclusive growth when it is socially inclusive, regionally balanced, which enables every state to do better than in the past, which narrows the gap between different communities, which also brings in our concern for gender equality, upliftment of women, improving their educational condition and social status.

The key features of Inclusive growth are as follows:

• Economic growth is a precondition for inclusive growth, though the nature and composition of growth has to be conducive to inclusion.
• Inclusive growth is to include the poor and lagging socio-economic groups such as ethnic / tribal groups, weaker sections as well as lagging regions as partners and beneficiaries of economic growth.
• The Inclusive growth addresses the constraints of the excluded and the marginalised. It has to open up opportunities for them to be partners in growth.
• Inclusive growth should be non-discriminatory and favourable for the excluded. This implies that inclusive growth has to be broad-based in terms of coverage of regions, and labour-intensive in terms of creating large-scale productive employment opportunities in the economy.
• Inclusive growth is expected to reduce poverty faster in the sense that it has to have a higher elasticity of poverty reduction.
• Inclusive growth has to ensure access of people to basic infrastructure and basic services/capabilities such as basic health and education. This access should include not only the quantity, but also quality of these basic services.
• Inclusive growth should reduce vertical as well as horizontal inequalities in incomes and assets.

Inclusive Growth is beyond reducing poverty

There are several aspects of inclusive growth, the key aspects being adequate flow of benefits to the poor and the most marginalised. However, inclusive growth also involves group equality, regional balance, gender balance and social / economic empowerment. The poor are certainly one group, but inclusiveness must also embrace the concern of other groups such as the Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), Other Backward Classes (OBCs), Minorities, differently-abled and other marginalised groups. Women can also be viewed as a disadvantaged group for this purpose. Further, regional balance aspect of inclusiveness relates to whether all regions, are seen to benefit from the growth process. An important constraint on the growth of backward regions in India is the poor state of infrastructure, especially road connectivity, schools and health facilities and the variability of electricity, all of which combine to hold back development. Improvement in infrastructure must therefore be an important component of any regionally inclusive development strategy.