<p>The process of achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 8 (SDG-8) that aims to promote the growth of an inclusive and sustainable economy, productive and decent work has become gradually central to global and national developmental agendas. Although sustained economic expansion, achieving SDG-8 remains specifically challenging in developing regions with high levels of informality, unemployment among young people, gender disparity, and unstable working relations. This paper presents a systematic analytical review of the decent work-economic growth nexus with an example of the northern Indian states of Punjab and Haryana placing the discussion in the context of subnational development and labour market processes. The research draws on the evidence of 82 academic sources, such as peer-reviewed journal and academic books, as well as policy documents of global, national, and state levels, and implements a comparative and sectoral analytical framework that is consistent with SDG-8. The results indicate that both states have continued to experience inadequate decent work outcomes, showed through widespread informal employment, the lack of skills among the educated young people, gender-based labour market inequalities, and low employment responsiveness to growth, even though both states have moderate levels of economic performance. Sectoral decomposition reveals that despite the expansion in employment within the construction and informal services, such expansion is both low-productivity and spatially concentrated which highlights the point that the problem is not absolute jobless growth but the quality and comprehensiveness of employment generation. The review also establishes pressing limitations of institutional and policy that comprise poor integration of decent work indicators in the state-level planning, fragmented programme implementation and weak labour market governance. This study, through clearly including comparative subnational analysis, sectoral growth-employment decomposition, and political-economy perspectives can add to the SDG-8 literature by showing that institutional and structural influences are more significant than aggregate growth rates by themselves in influencing growth-employment outcomes. The paper ends with evidence-based policy recommendations to harmonize the strategies of economic growth with the goals of decent work in Punjab and Haryana in order to facilitate more inclusive and sustainable development options.</p>