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As you know, India’s performance in recent years has been among the best in the world. The reforms initiated since the early 1990s have unshackled the economy. The long-term trend rate of growth has steadily increased from an average of 3.5 per cent a year between the 1950s and 1970s, to above 9 pr cent in 2006 and 2007. The prowess of India’s IT and IT-enabled services, biotechnology, pharma-ceuticals, and various manufacturing segments is being recognized the world over. Its macro-fundamentals are sound and foreign exchange reserves are comfortable at around $ 250 billion. Inflation rate has come down to less than 2 per cent. Importantly, high growth has led to a decline in the incidence of poverty from 36 per cent in 1993-1994 to 26 per cent in 1999-2000. The number of people in poverty came down from 320 million to 260 million during this period and has undoubtedly declined further since the last official estimates became available. Despite these improvements, most poverty-related education and health indicators continue to show disturbing gender gaps, large rural-urban differences and wide variation across states. As you can imagine, the potential economic and social costs associated with these and other inequities are enormous. These harsh realities present serious challenges for India’s policy makers. One problem is that, despite strong economic performance, job creation has not kept pace with a growing labor force. In fact, the rate of employment growth declined from 2.7 per cent per year in 1983-1984 to barely over 1 per cent in 1994-2000. Another issue is the deceleration in agriculture growth, which reflects a broad based slow-down in productivity growth. Growth in the sector declined from over 3 per cent a year between 1980 and the mid-1990s to a subsequent trend average of 2.4 per cent instead during 9tha and 10th Five Year Plan period, instead of 4 per cent expected and the share of agriculture in total employment dropped from 60 per cent in 1993-1994 to 57 per cent in 1999-2000. Given the relatively low employment generation potential of the fast-growing services sector, the agriculture sector, on which the livelihood of the majority of Indians depends, needs to be reinvigorated. While some states like Maharastra, Gujarat, Karnataka, Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, and Tamil Nadu were able to benefit from India’s economic reforms and increase their growth rates significantly, some of the poorest and most populous states like Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Charkhand and North Easter States have fallen behind. Even advanced and dynamic states have pockets of extreme poverty. Much of this is due to poor physical and social infrastructure. Finding adequate resources for funding the required infrastructure facilities therefore remains a major challenge. The Government of India is fully aware of these problems and has been working to address them. Similarly, the Government’s ambitious programs for national highways, rural roads, railway freight corridors, power generation and transmission, and urban infrastructure are positive steps in this direction. Even though farming supports 60 per cent of India’s 1.1 billion people, it contributes only a fifth of gross domestic product and accounts for only around 15 percent of bank credit. Indian’s Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh has stated that “For the people in India, a message is the message of inclusive growth. But that’s a message, which is also relevant for the world as a whole. Jawaharlal Nehru used to say peace and prosperity are indivisible, so is disaster. And therefore, in this one world, which cannot be fragmented into parts, one has to ask how can we work together to ensure the process of social and economic change within our country and in the world as a whole to reach out to the most deprived, marginalized sections of the community.” This edited volume examining the performance, issues and challenges of Indian’s economic growth and equitable distribution of wealth in India. The authors argue for rural infrastructure development, implementation of poverty alleviation and employment generation programmes in rural areas, more allocation for social sector development, encouragement for small and medium and resource based industries in rural areas for an effective and equitable distribution of prosperity attained through economic growth.
ISBN - 9788183873086
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Pages : 679
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