Capabilities and Wellbeing Frameworks in India and Russia: A Comparative Analysis. Evidence, Policy Uptake, and Implications for Inclusive Growth

This book examines how capabilities and wellbeing frameworks are operationalised in BRICS, with emphasis on India and Russia. It addresses the intricateness of progressing beyond conventional aggregate-centric paradigms, unfolding how inclusive growth is measured, entrained in institutions, and appropriated into planning instruments, methodising responses that deepen interconnected equitable capacity and outcomes, and navigate peripheralisation integrity.The study conducts a structured scoping review of academic and governmental literature to dissect how development constructs assimilate into state authority, traversing four facets: metrics, programme design, budgeting and targeting, and evaluation. Through the comparative analysis, we distinguish where strategies are embedded, adapted, or resisted, highlighting actionable avenues to attune precedents with evolving feasibility and socio-demographic divergence.In India, decentralised delivery of social protection, vocational skills formation, and green finance are mapped to measurable gains in poverty reduction and service coverage, albeit spatial disparities and sectoral heterogeneity persist. Russia's contracted top-down hierarchic superintendence is predisposed to demographic pressures, labour migration, and conflict-induced risks, exposing tensions between expanse imperatives, distributional dissimilitude, and fairness gradation.The research recommendations advance debates on post GDP development overstructures, underpinned by a contrastive policy lens, sequenced to broad-based progress exigencies: formalise multidimensional indicators in fiscal coordination and retrospective components to surface distributional, intertemporal, and opportunity cost trade-offs; reconcile budgets toward capability evolution, leveraging achievement orientated transfers to reduce locational inequities; scale quasi experimental and directional data informed assessments to transmute human capital modalities for momentum whilst unravelling externalities.