It is argued that the strategy of inclusive growth is intended to meet the objectives of inclusiveness and sustainability together. Comment on this statement.

What the strategy intends

• Inclusiveness means jobs, food, health, schooling, and a voice for those who would otherwise miss the market: Scheduled Castes and Tribes, women, small farmers, and backward districts.
• Sustainability means the same generation does not eat the next generation’s groundwater, forests, fiscal space, or climate room.
• Together they are one strategy because a growth path that leaves people out is politically unstable, and a path that wrecks ecology is economically short. The Sustainable Development Goals (2015) and the Paris Agreement put that pairing into India’s international script.
• Indian tools that try to do both at once include Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act assets (water, trees), Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (clean cooking), Swachh Bharat, Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana plus Direct Benefit Transfer, National Food Security Act, Ayushman Bharat, Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, and renewable programmes such as Ujwal DISCOM Assurance Yojana paired with solar missions.

Where the two aims support each other

• Health, sanitation, and clean fuel raise labour productivity and cut household pollution; that is inclusion and a lighter environment load.
• Skills, rural roads (Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana), and digital payments let the poor join markets without a new forest cut if the project is sited honestly.
• Climate-smart agriculture (millets, pulses, efficient irrigation) can raise small-farm income and spare aquifers.
• A greener power mix, if it also electrifies poor households, is both an SDG energy goal and an inclusion goal.

Where they clash in Indian practice

• Cheap coal and unmetered farm power have been used as inclusion (jobs, irrigation) while they drain sustainability (emissions, bankrupt discoms, falling water tables).
• Minimum Support Price plus heavy paddy–wheat procurement feeds the poor through the public distribution system but locks water-stressed belts into a thirsty rotation.
• Rapid highway and mining projects can raise GDP and some wages while displacing Adivasi livelihood if Forest Rights and rehabilitation are weak.
• Large welfare outlays without targeting or without a tax base threaten fiscal sustainability, which later hits the same poor through inflation or a capex freeze.
• Urban inclusion (housing, metro) can still fail sustainability if it is sprawl without sewage and public transport.

Comment

• The statement is right as design: inclusiveness without sustainability is a short boom; sustainability without inclusiveness is a green enclave.
• The statement is incomplete as description: India still often sequences “grow first, clean later” in minerals and thermal power, and “spend first, target later” in subsidies.
• A working strategy treats green jobs, metered irrigation, DBT for kerosene and fertiliser leakages, coastal and Himalayan carrying-capacity plans, and a just coal transition as the joint programme, not as two ministries’ separate pamphlets.