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Including the Excluded: Inclusive Economic Growth in India After 2004

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Changing Contexts and Shifting Roles of the Indian State

Part of the book series: Dynamics of Asian Development ((DAD))

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Abstract

This chapter begins by presenting a well-founded popular perception—that India has long been experiencing growth without development. Whether economic growth was slow (until c1980) or among the world’s fastest (after 2003) that it never had the expected impact on improving human welfare . The concerns regarding this process reached from the moral doubts about inequality being unfair to the more practical that inequality could both lower growth rates and make growth unsustainable. Something happened after the mid-2000s. There is accumulating evidence that growth in India now seems more tightly linked to improvements in human well-being. This chapter explores several complementary hypotheses to explain this shift. The revolt of the activists and improvements in information provide at best only partial explanations. The change in the nature of national politics in India to something more predictable and durable seems the most promising explanation for the tighter link between growth and welfare .

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The story becomes more complicated if we look more closely within these broad aggregate groups (STs, SCs, etc.). Economic growth alone should have reduced poverty among STs by 12% between 2004/2005 and 2009/2010 but more than half of this was offset by worsening income distribution among ST households (Thorat and Dubey 2012).

  2. 2.

    It is power rather than information which is asymmetric in this example—thanks to Anthony D’Costa for making me think about this interesting point.

  3. 3.

    The policy programme agreed to by the incoming UPA alliance in 2004 and its outside supporters among the Left political parties.

  4. 4.

    Other initiatives failed to influence actual policy. The Sachar Committee Report reflected on the deprivation of Muslims. The recommendations were opposed by the BJP and also by other groups fearing any re-allocation of resources from their own (also deprived) constituents, such as Congress Dalit MPs. Implementation of the committee’s recommendations was passed on to the newly created Ministry for Minority Affairs (MMA) and no assessment or monitoring system was set up. The MMA was allocation only 0.32% of the Eleventh Plan outlay to run 12 separate and small schemes. The MMA, in general, operated as an ineffectual post office, lacking policy implementation capacity of its own it relied mainly on forwarding requests to other ministries. Even its own minister, Salman Kurshid called it “powerless and redundant” (Hasan 2012: 171). Another example is the failure to act upon the recommendations of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) which sought to spread entitlements to unorganised sector workers.

  5. 5.

    Chacko (this volume) discusses this in more detail and has a more strongly positive opinion about the role of civil society welfare campaigns.

  6. 6.

    This section largely draws from McCartney and Roy (2016).

  7. 7.

    Chacko (this volume) discusses the evolution of social policy under the Modi government in more detail.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Matthew McCartney

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Business, The University of Alabama, Huntsville, AL, USA

    Anthony P. D’Costa

  2. Director and Professor of Economics, Institute of Development Studies Kolkata, Kolkata, India

    Achin Chakraborty

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McCartney, M. (2019). Including the Excluded: Inclusive Economic Growth in India After 2004. In: D’Costa, A., Chakraborty, A. (eds) Changing Contexts and Shifting Roles of the Indian State. Dynamics of Asian Development. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6891-2_5

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