Inclusiveness and the Progress of Indian States: Evidence from Inclusive Development Index Between 2011 and 2018

Abstract

This article examines the progress of the Indian states in inclusiveness between 2011 and 2018, based on the “Inclusive Development Index” (IDI), which includes many important aspects of the economy and people. The study has followed the broad guidelines of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development—OECD (2008) to construct IDI, and it is based on two pillars of growth—the process and the outcome. The index includes 26 sub-pillars represented by 104 indicators. The weights of the indicators are obtained separately for 2011 and 2018 by applying the principal component analysis at the indicator level, and then a simple average has been computed at the sub-pillar and pillar levels to obtain the composite IDI for the 19 major Indian states. The composite IDI shows that in 2018, while the most inclusive states are Himachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh and Kerala, the least inclusive are the states of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh (UP), Madhya Pradesh (MP), Assam, Jharkhand and Bihar. The performance of the states, however, varies among pillars, sub-pillars and indicators in both 2011 and 2018. The study may help the states to identify their spheres of “low” performance and learn from their “front-runner” peers, so as to take the necessary policy initiatives.

Inequality and Inclusive Development: Evidence from Selected Indian States

“…Though analysing poverty from the perspectives of rural–urban is not the objective of the current research, another indicator of poverty used in the calculation of IDI (Aggarwal, 2021b) is the status of poor in the urban areas which generally, besides other dimensions, manifest in the slum population as a proportion of total urban population. The higher slum population is a sure sign of both poverty and poor living conditions—access to water, electricity, sanitation, education etc.…”

“…Based on the indicators, sub-pillars and pillars, the IDI for 2011–2012 and 2017–2018 has been computed by (i) normalising the values of the indicators, (ii) aggregating the indicators at the sub-pillar level by taking the weighted average of the indicators, where the weights are obtained through the use of Principal component analysis, (iii) taking a simple average of all the sub-pillars within a pillar to aggregate into the values for both the pillars and finally (iv) averaging the values of the two pillars to obtain the composite score of the IDI for each state. The states are ranked on the basis of the composite score of the index (Aggarwal, 2021b) and the composite IDI score and rank for 2011–2012 and 2017–2018 are presented in Table 2.…”

“…Few studies have attempted to study inclusiveness in India and its states from different perspectives and there are still a very few studies that provide a comprehensive index of inclusiveness. 9 The study on IDI by Aggarwal (2021aAggarwal ( , 2021b 2.…”

“…The growth in GDP both at the state level and at national level plays an important role in the inclusiveness through the process of development and the outcome of development (Aggarwal, 2021b). The major policy concern with most fast growth outcomes, however, is that the bottom half of the population possibly does not share equally in the process.…”

“…Though the data on growth of state gross domestic product are available as a continuous series, the estimates on poverty and inequality are available only at selected time periods and are not available after 2011-2012 due to non-release of the consumer expenditure survey report for 2017-2018. Since the inclusive development index (IDI) for the states has been computed for -2012-2018(Aggarwal, 2021b, the index can be used for the level comparisons in 2011-2012 and 2017-2018 and also for an analysis of the trend in growth and inclusiveness.…”