Realising the Demographic Dividend

Santosh Mehrotra is Professor of Economics at the Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He was earlier Director General of the National Institute for Labour Economics Research, the only research institute of the Planning Commission of India. Mehrotra also headed the Rural Development Division and then the Development Policy Division of the Commission. He was the team leader of the India Human Development Report 2011 and was the chief economist of the Human Development Report, New York. Professor Mehrotra's research has been translated into French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Portuguese.

• List of tables and figures; Preface; Acknowledgements; Part I. Growth, Employment and Inclusion: 1. Capability-centred approach to inclusive growth: theoretical framework and empirical reality; 2. Sustaining economic growth; 3. Ensuring higher agricultural growth and the revival of rural India; 4. Addressing the employment-related paradoxes of economic growth; 5. Public finance: increasing fiscal capacity; 6. Skill development: finding new financing mechanisms to take vocational education and training to scale; 7. A common platform for skill development: implementing the national skills qualification framework; Part II. Human Capital Formation: 8. Addressing capability deprivation of women for inclusive growth; 9. From the right to education to the right to learning; 10. Food security, nutrition and health: policy dilemmas and interlinked challenges; 11. Redesigning sanitation programmes to make India free from open defaecation; Part III. Building a System of Social Protection: 12. Minimising leakages in welfare programmes: how to identify the poor correctly?; 13. Needed a social insurance system for unorganised workers below the poverty line; 14. Introducing cash transfers: a proposal for a minimum income guarantee and some CCTs; Part IV. Governance: 15. Two pre-requisites for optimum governance: deep fiscal decentralisation and the bureaucracy's ability to learn; 16. Addressing left-wing extremism: encourage peace to secure development – or the other way around?; Index.

'This is a topic of fundamental importance to the future development path of India. The script is exceptionally clearly structured and sharply written. This is a topical issue about which an increasing number of people are writing. However, the level of analysis in this volume is far above other analyses of this complex topic. This book is likely to be widely referred to and become a standard reference for debates about India's labour market and employment policies, and their relationship to growth and social justice in India.' Peter Nolan, Director of Development Economics, University of Cambridge