A feminist lens is required at the forefront to understand the gender inequality.

2007-12, the Planning Commission set up a Working Group of Feminist Economists to review the sectoral chapters of the Eleventh Plan through a gender lens. Engaging with the draft chapters, the group established the primacy of women and their work in India's growth achievement. It argued that planning processes and methods exhibited an inadequate awareness of these facts. The value of this initiative was that it advocated moving beyond a special focus in the chapter on "Women and Child" to looking at women as growth agents in India's political economy, across all sectors. Thus, the major shift of this initiative was to move the gendering of public policy into macroeconomic space (Planning Commission 2010). The Planning Commission has reconstituted the Working Group of Feminist Economists for the Twelfth Five-Year Plan. This paper draws on an earlier gendered analysis of the ideas in the Approach Paper to the Twelfth Plan (henceforth Planning Commission 2011). While the wheels of the planning process have been moving steadily forward, we believe that the directions proposed in the approach paper continue to shape planning. The strategies for growth proposed in the Twelfth Plan appear to be formulated with little consideration for the needs and roles of large sections of the population of the country and especially those of poor women (Planning Commission 2011). This paper aims to highlight some of these glaring gaps in the overall design of the proposed plan and to suggest ways of making economic growth during the twelfth century. Despite several decades of struggle by women's groups to make policy gender-sensitive, the approach to the Twelfth Plan exhibits insufficient awareness of the specific problems of women, their unpaid labour and their distinctive economic contribution to the nation's economy. The overall theme for planning is achieving "faster, sustainable and more inclusive growth" (Planning Commission 2011). The thrust is on increas ing the rate of growth of gross domestic product (gdp) or the rate of expansion of the total volume of output of goods and services in the economy, especially at a time when there has been a drop, relative to past rates of growth. The approach paper notes that inclusiveness is a multi-dimensional pheno menon. Inclusive growth should result in the lower incidence of poverty, broad-based and significant improvements in health outcomes, universal access for children to schooling