The Unheeded Conscience

"Economic solutions are political questions" —Joan Robinson

HE was only nine when the sight of people starving to death on the streets of Calcutta in the 1943 Bengal famine rudely opened his eyes to a grossly unequal world. And prompted him to go beyond the metred discipline of Sanskrit, his grandfather's subject, towards the uncharted areas of the dismal science. At 23, he was the youngest professor in India. At 37 came his seminal work Collective Choice and Social Welfare and became an instant classic. The book was written for all; every chapter had two versions—one outlining the concept in algebraic logic and the other in lucid English for the lay reader. Says his teacher and mentor Tapas Mazumdar, professor emeritus, JNU: "That book should have got Amartya the Nobel straightaway."

From Shantiniketan to Stockholm, it's been a long, eventful journey for Amartya Kumar Sen. The interregnum saw many myths demolished by him in welfare and equality, many more values reinforced and new frontiers explored. And today, as the country—and the economics fraternity—takes a breathless pause to celebrate the Nobel for the Master of Trinity College, it's time to ask a few long unasked questions. How much of the world really values his stubborn crusade towards a more equitable, just society where economic growth is "valuable precisely because it helps to eradicate deprivation and improve the capabilities and quality of life for ordinary people"? How much, for that matter, has India done to honour Sen's commitment to what was also Nehru's "tryst with destiny"?

After 10 years of being on the recommendations list—"it was nice that a number of people found this a plausible idea", he told journalists in Cambridge after getting the prize—Sen naturally feels rewarded that the Nobel Committee gave recognition to "the subject that affects those doing well as well as those doing badly". But for more than half of the global population steeped in endemic poverty, starvation, illiteracy, gender bias and deep debt, the acknowledgement may mean little. Even as we write this ode to Sen, in some of the best and fastest growing economies, more than 15 per cent of the people are out of jobs. And their number is growing, thanks to the Asian crisis blowing into a global recession.

For too many years, Stockholm had chosen to deify the Chicago School and technical wizards in money and markets—"contributions in second-rate maths and third-rate physics" as one professor derided. Post-Milton Friedman, who won the Nobel in 1976, the award has rarely gone to those whose economic oeuvre was not in tune with the current mantra of global capitalism. The irony of this was not lost on Sen. "When I say I'm an economist, people ask me, 'What should I invest in?'" he bantered. But the "establishment" bubble finally burst with 1997's winners, Robert Merton and Myron Scholes, who developed a way to value derivatives. Recently, Long-Term Capital Management, the giant hedge firm they were partners in and which used their models, went bust, needing a $3.6 billion bailout. All of this past year, the belief that a free market was the cure of all ills has been badly shaken, making the western world grope towards a third way. This year's prize clears shows that it has now inevitably come to think the way Professor Sen always has.

Which is that economics is meaningless without an ethical core. Academically, Sen's greatest contribution may have been to extend 1972 winner Kenneth Arrow's 1951 work on the impossibility theorem and bring it into the mainstream, out of the esotericism that welfare economics had enjoyed. But his greatest triumph has been to widen economic discussion to the realm of moral philosophy. Forcing the Nobel citation to recall principles that its writers had probably forgotten in the first flush of market-worshipping: "By combining tools from economics and philosophy, he has restored an ethical dimension to the discussion of vital economic problems."

Haunted by his memories of the Bengal famine, perhaps the most vicious man-made famine in human history (millions died, not because of crop failure, but because the entire agricultural produce of Bengal had been diverted for the British war effort by Winston Churchill, with full knowledge of the consequences), chased across the world by the deprivations he witnessed, Sen has made it his life's work to understand inequality, the relentless injustice that the world metes out to millions of human beings. Yet, he remains unabashedly Indian, retaining his citizenship despite visa problems.

Sunil Sengupta, a rural development economist at Visva Bharati University, who has worked with Sen, says even today whenever Sen drops into Shantiniketan, the first question he will ask him is: "What's happening in the villages? What are the new studies being done on villages?" Despite his impeccable English, Sen has claimed that when he multiplies numbers in his head, he does it in Bengali.

Amartya Sen is what he is because he is an Indian. And the perverse paradox is that this is not something for India to be proud of. It is his country's wretchedness that has driven Sen to these matchless heights. A former student who was fascinated by the young lecturer agrees. Montek Ahluwalia, Planning Commission member, says: "A lot of his work is not only relevant but is based on India's economic reality." But the reverse does not apply: it will be sacrilegious to say that India has looked upon its brilliant son as merely another Nobel contender. And for all we know, the government may continue to do that still—just bask in his Nobel halo. Ranked by the UN Human Development Index, an index Sen's work helped develop, India stands at 139. Clearly, in human capabilities (ie, the opportunities to achieve well-being and a means to freedom), the lessons of Master Sen have not been learnt here.

For the medicine Sen suggests for a just Indian society is of little interest to our politicians. Massive and efficient investment in primary education, for instance, needs a long time to bear fruit. Longer, at least, than the gap between two polls.

 Even as he went on extending his work from welfare to inequality, employment and technology, Sen was preparing for his major study Poverty and Famines. Drawn on experience in India and famine-prone African countries, he proved that famine didn't result from natural causes or food scarcity—some countries even exported food even as thousands starved—it was more an administrative and social failure. More important was the relative position of social groups which affected their entitlements and intensified deprivation. Also important was the form of government—in a democracy, the state is spurred by a free media and a wakeful public into food redistribution and price control to prevent famines from taking place. "The absence of democracy is not just a violation of human rights and political liberty, but it's also a major violation of people's security in the most basic sense, the security of survival," he said.

THE same argument formed the backbone of his 1970 lecture on Indian education. "I argued that there were deep-seated class biases in the pressures that have determined educational priorities, and inequalities of education are a reflection of inequalities of economic and social powers of different groups. The educational inequalities both reflect and help to sustain social disparities, and for a real break, much more determined political action is needed than has been provided so far," he said. He also blasted the Indian Left for their poor record in self-ruled states like Bengal, contrasting the superior record of the Soviet Union, Cuba or Vietnam.

It's easy to see then why the prophet has been ignored by a state which, in the first 40 years of independence, has been interested only in tightening regulation over all productive capacities. "The problem," he told reporters on Friday, "has been an overactivity of the government in industrial control, and underactivity in areas like education, healthcare and land reforms." As he wrote in 1995: "There has been an astonishing failure of adequate public action in expanding basic education, elementary health care, land reforms and social security. Too little government action—not too much—has been the basic problem." A stand which seems to have been recently usurped by the planners and the government alike, though not much action has followed. Says Ahluwalia, a former finance secretary who has overseen most of the '90s reforms: "Dr Sen has supported the line we have taken on market-based reforms—liberalisation is incomplete without a social and human development base."

 Says Suresh Tendulkar of the Delhi School of Economics: "While it's difficult to comment on whether the state has failed Amartya, it is certainly true that the Indian state has failed the society. That interpretation is possible." It's also true that for years, Sen has avoided taking a stand on politically explosive issues like subsidies, the rising expenditure on which is making the states less and less capable of launching a direct attack on social ills. In India to receive one of his many awards in June last year, Sen was agonisingly pucca: "Let me make it clear. I'm saying nothing on agricultural subsidies." But then, as he described himself while naming the biggest influences on him—Kautilya, Aristotle, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Joan Robinson, Maurice Dobb, Arrow, Tiero Sraffa and John Rawls—"No one has influenced me radically. I'm not a radical person."

Still, notes Tendulkar, "his contribution is significant because he has put the issues of human capabilities on the social consciousness, despite being a great supporter of market economies". Sen's capability poverty measure, the Sen index, has gone on to enrich the field of development economies, lending value to the HDI. Perhaps thanks to his persistent efforts, government expenditure on education has gone up in India, education has been made a basic right (though Sen would attach little importance to such public postures), and most of the aid is used to supplement a profligate government's weakening allocation to social sectors.

Says Mrinal Dutta Chowdhury of the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi University: "Sen has never been a cheerleader for financial liberalisation and even the World Bank has veered round to accepting the primacy of the serious issues in economics." Of late, in fact, Sen has explored a third area between the markets and the state, calling for decentralised intervention in these areas through civil society, panchayats, NGOs and the like, rather than centralised intervention by the administration. Adds Tendulkar: "The eighties were an intellectual watershed for all left-of-centre social scientists. Post-Soviet Union, many of them worked out a new worldview where both the state and market could play a role." A third way which seems to be gathering force now.

ACKNOWLEDGING his contribution, Anthony Giddens, London School of Economics director and author of The Third Way, says: "His work has ranged well beyond economics and his studies on welfare, rights and inequality have influenced social scientists in many disciplines." Sen's exploration of the Third Way is clear from his views on liberalisation. "What's needed," he told Outlook in New York, "is combining market reforms with a programme of social opportunities such as micro credit, safety net systems, healthcare facilities." Laments Sen: "We have produced some of the best economists. We can be legitimately proud of our achievements also in statistics, mathematics, computer sciences. It's fashionable to cite the economic success in East Asia and attribute it to their economies being more open than those in India or Pakistan. But it's also true that Pakistan and India had neglected education, health care and land reform in a truly regrettable way. So when the situation opened up, there were a lot of people who were not ready to compete in the global world."

The most telling comment on India's progress? "The immigration officer at Heathrow told me, you people are getting Nobel Prizes, but the economy's still in a mess. So I take the Prize seriously, but not that seriously." Indeed, his reaction to the honour has been marked by witty nonchalance: "Getting the Prize is a nice thing, but it hasn't been one of my living anxieties all the time. Even if I didn't get it, I still have a reasonably comfortable job, I am happy with my wife. But of course, it's better to get it than not get it." But his attitude changes when he talks of his homeland. In January, he mused that if there were any personal ambitions he harboured still, they revolved around "getting involved with the future of India". "I go to India at least three times a year and speak strongly on issues of social inequality. I am often accused of repeating myself. But I will continue to speak on these issues as long as there is neglect in curbing social, political and economic inequality."

 Amartya Sen's triumph is surely India's pride, but it is also his nation's tragedy.