Despite Consistent experience of high growth, India still goes with the lowest indicators of human development. Examine the issues that make balanced and inclusive development elusive.

India has been the world's fastest-growing major economy for a decade, yet ranks only 130th of 193 countries in UNDP's Human Development Report 2025 — evidence that growth is not translating into human capabilities.

Why balanced and inclusive development remains elusive

• Pattern of growth: services-led and capital-intensive, it generates too few good jobs; roughly 90 per cent of workers remain informal, without social security or predictable incomes.
• Under-investment in people: public health spending hovers around 2 per cent of GDP and education around 3 per cent — well short of the National Education Policy's 6 per cent benchmark — so out-of-pocket costs keep impoverishing households.
• Nutrition failure: NFHS-5 records 35.5 per cent child stunting and anaemia in 57 per cent of women, crippling learning, productivity and lifetime earnings.
• Inequality: the top 10 per cent corner over half of national income, and prosperous and lagging states are diverging, concentrating capital and talent in a few regions.
• Gender exclusion: female labour-force participation, though improving, remains far below East Asian levels, wasting half the demographic dividend.
• Delivery deficits: vacancies in schools and health centres, leakages and weak local governments blunt even well-designed social schemes.

Inclusive development requires consciously redirecting the growth dividend into human capital — Ayushman Bharat, NEP 2020, POSHAN 2.0 and formalisation of work — so that GDP growth compounds into human development instead of bypassing it.