Inclusive growth in India: Past performance and future prospects

Reforms undertaken in the early 1990s made India one of the world's fastest growing economies. The boom of the IT industry and improved agricultural production created an atmosphere of optimism, which led to the coining of phrases, such as Incredible India, India Shining, and India 2020 around the end of the millennium. This paper elaborates the need to build Inclusive India and emphasizes why it is imperative to focus on inclusive growth now. It presents the opportunities available for building an inclusive India by identifying key levers in governance, education, energy and resources, telecom and technology, infrastructure, healthcare, financial inclusion, and business model innovation. It gives examples of initiatives undertaken by other countries to build inclusiveness, such as those by Thailand, Malaysia, Kenya, and the Gambia in the education sector. It also highlights some of the reasons why efforts to build an Inclusive India in the past have had only limited success and what can be done better in the future so that inclusive growth is realized. The paper further stresses upon the need for the public and the private sector to work in tandem and leverage each other's strengths to drive inclusive growth.