India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Vol. 16 :: No. 02 :: Jan. 16 - 29, 1999

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EXCELLENCE

A lasting impression

Amartya Sen's engagements in Delhi were constantly underpinned by a genuine and captivating aura of humility and accessibility.

SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN
in New Delhi

TRADITIONALLY, the discipline of economics has ascribed an intrinsic value to those aspects of performance that are only instrumentally useful for human life, such as income, gross domestic product (GDP) and a host of other economic aggregates and parameters. The concept of "human development", which Amartya Sen developed in close association with Mahbub-ul-Haq, dealt with this lacuna in theory by shifting the focus from these otherwise abstract entities towards the social and political processes by which their implications for human life are realised.

Releasing the Madhya Pradesh Human Development Report, 1998, in Delhi on December 5, Sen commended the State Government's pioneering effort in bringing "human development" to the foreground of policy initiatives. The MP-HDR, he said, focussed attention on three aspects of the problem of development: dialogue, achievement and agency. It contributed in a fundamental sense to the requirement of a dialogue on social and public policy which has, curiously enough for an otherwise vibrant democracy, largely been absent in India.

Speaking on the occasion, Sen said that the focus on achievement provided appropriate contrasts between successes and failures. He said that public policy had succeeded in reducing the incidence of catastrophic famines, though endemic hunger and malnutrition remained a looming threat to human welfare in South Asia. Sen said that there should be political penalties for these conspicuous failures, so that all forms of human deprivation move to the centre of political concern. That apart, failures were intrinsically worth discussing, since they enabled the formulation of strategies to overcome them. Addressing a rapt audience at one of the last of his many public engagements in Delhi, the Nobel laureate reached for an analogy from ancient philosophy. He said that "dialogue" contributes to the formation of jnana or knowledge. The focus on "achievement" helped fix political commitments towards certain desirable goals - a sense of devotion to a cause that could be encapsulated under the term bhakti. Finally, to complete the trinity of mutually dependent and connected pathways towards the goals of human endeavour, there was the notion of karma or agency. Sen said that in focussing on community initiatives towards goal fulfilment, the notion of "human development" redresses the crippling effects of an exclusive dependence upon the state. He said that achievement was very often linked to agency, the efficacy of goal fulfilment often being a function of the social mechanisms through which it was sought.

It was a virtuoso performance by the Nobel laureate; he succeeded in bridging the gap between the tools of his craft - which he has been instrumental in forging - and the ancient concepts that endowed them with a special resonance for the audience. A demonstration of "forum sensitivity" was characteristic of Sen's engagements, which were constantly underpinned by a genuine and captivating aura of humility and accessibility.

V. SUDERSHAN
Amartya Sen and his wife Emma Rothschild call on Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee in New Delhi.

IN Delhi, Sen first visited the Finance Ministry, where he was closeted for a while with Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha. It was an occasion that evoked strong memories of a vow the economist had made in an interview with All India Radio a day before he received the Nobel Prize. Quintessentially a child of the Bengali enlightenment, Sen had put forward the proposition that to meet the demands of globalisation and competition, India needed to provide education to its people. He had said that if he were to meet the Indian Finance Minister, he would "tell him to stop thinking in wrong terms and ask him to get his objectives right." By all accounts, there was none of this admonitory sternness in Sen's manner when he called on the Finance Minister on New Year's Day. Rather, he chose to restate the case for a radical revision of priorities and admitted that there was no "instant solution" to reverse a "history of neglect".

Later that day, Sen was conferred with an honorary doctorate in letters by the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Having attended scores of such occasions since being awarded the Nobel Prize, Sen confessed to a desire to depart from the usual pattern of convocation addresses. The subject of his address at JNU was stirring in its conception and delivery. Sen said that three criteria were often used by practitioners of the natural sciences to deny economics the appellation of a science. These were its lack of precision, dependence on subjective judgments and tendency to accord a large weight for value judgments. All these criticisms were, he said, misplaced for a variety of reasons. As a field of inquiry, economics studied the "subjective features of the human mind". But in doing so, there was no necessary sacrifice of objectivity, he said. As for precision, the degree that was achievable in economics was appropriate and adequate for the domain of inquiry. He said that value judgments were inherent in any science in pointing the inquiring mind towards the problems that merited its attention.

The active and politically acute student community at JNU was agitated at being deprived of, on account of the limited capacity of the auditorium, an opportunity to bask in the effulgence of the Nobel laureate's wisdom. Sen was quick to assuage their wounded sensitivities; soon after the convocation, he had an exclusive session with the student community at another venue on the campus. The themes dealt with at this gathering were distinct. Among other things, the notions of the appropriate agency for developmental tasks, and corruption and accountability in governance were discussed. Sen said that a system that depended entirely on the government was a fertile breeding ground for corruption. Possibilities of detection of malfeasance constituted a necessary qualification to this generalisation. He said that in this respect, the vigour and independence of the media and the strength of grassroots organisations were of particular importance.

While releasing a report on basic education the next day, Sen said: "We live in a democracy. What we get depends upon what we demand." The non-official exercise entitled "Public Report on Basic Education" embodies another of the economist's long-standing social commitments. Promising to take the essence of the report to his evening meeting with President K.R. Narayanan, Sen suggested that an amendment to the Indian Constitution, which made basic education a fundamental right of the citizen, would not be out of place. But, he said, none of this would follow spontaneously without concerted social pressure from the sections that have the greatest stake in the matter.

A public hearing on basic education followed the formal release of the report. Among those present was Union Education Secretary P.R. Dasgupta, who pointed out, among other things, that basic education was already a fundamental right, having been classified as such by the Supreme Court in a 1993 ruling. However, Sen was less than reassured by this. He insisted that an amendment to the Constitution would still have far-reaching value since it would create a higher level of public consciousness and engender certain overt commitments on the part of the state.

Sen also pointed out that the Indian press, though free to an unparalleled degree, often got its priorities wrong. The energy it devoted to certain social deprivations, such as on the educational front, was nowhere near proportionate to the extent of the deprivation. In this connection, he drew pointed attention to a section of the report on basic education, which catalogued the number of articles carried in the Indian press on the problem of rural education, and found that their number was rather paltry.

As he left for a meeting with Sonia Gandhi, Sen was seen to be carrying the report on basic education with him. It is understood that he took up the issue with the Congress president. By all accounts, neither was his social conscience in any way subdued at the formal banquet hosted for him by President K.R. Narayanan later that day.

Delhi University, where Sen began his career as a teacher, conferred an honorary doctorate of letters on the Nobel laureate on January 3. It was an occasion for nostalgic reminiscences and rousing felicitations by the faculty and alumni of the Delhi School of Economics, who had assembled in large numbers. V.R. Mehta, the Vice-Chancellor of the Delhi University, provided a recapitulation of the epochal theoretical innovations the discipline of economics owed Sen, and sketched out their logical interlinkages.

Speaking to the assembled crowd, Sen described the years he spent at "D-School", as the institution is popularly known, as the most important of his life. He said that the students he had were among the best he has had and his colleagues were among the most intellectually stimulating academic company he has kept. Sen said that many of the theoretical vistas that he was to explore later were opened up during his tenure at "D School". "It all began here in lectures," he said. "Social theory and welfare economics emerged during question and answer sessions at Delhi." In a moment of levity, Sen quipped that his experiences in Delhi had convinced him "never to publish a book unless you have tried it out on your students."

With the reminiscences out of the way, Sen turned to the exposition of the concepts and principles that have earned him the highest honour in his discipline. He spoke about development, freedom and social choice. Freedom, he said, translates itself into a multiplicity of choices for a social collectivity. The choice is not determined for society, but emerges out of its dispersed decision-making processes. Freedom was also about marshalling disparate priorities into a broadly acceptable orientation of social priorities and deployment of economic resources.

Sen was conferred a third honorary doctorate in letters by the Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj University, Kanpur, on January 4. The occasion provided an opportunity for Sen to display his considerable linguistic skills, particularly in Sanskrit.

At a press conference earlier that day, Sen had been asked about Vishwa Hindu Parishad president Ashok Singhal's allegation that the Nobel Prize was part of a Western Christian conspiracy to infiltrate India. Sen declined to comment, although he did admit that he was rather disturbed by the reports. He did seek reassurance from unconfirmed reports that Singhal had since retracted his statement.

RAJEEV BHATT
At a function in New Delhi where the Madhya Pradesh Human Development Report, 1998, was released on December 5, (from left) Prof. Amartya Sen, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Digvijay Singh and Frontline Editor N. Ram.

The range of issues that Sen dealt with at the press conference was immense, provoking him to remark at one point that a Nobel award did not qualify him to pronounce judgment on all of them. On military expenditure, he said that South Asia presented a picture of paradox, devoting an excessive part of its resources to defence. He said that it did provide some scope for reduction, since a reallocation towards essential social expenditure would improve overall welfare levels substantially. But this switching of priorities could not be achieved all of a sudden, and would require intensive social and political debate. He said that for the short term, all he could recommend was that the debate be joined.

A derivative question was posed on the high levels of corruption in the social sectors. Sen was definitive in rejecting the notion that corruption in the system could be used as an alibi for neglecting to plough additional resources into it. Rather, the way out was for social sector expenditure to prioritise peoples' empowerment. In other words, development was not merely a matter of providing larger volumes of money or commodities to people cast in the role of passive recipients. It was about enabling them to participate as productive agents in society.

Among Sen's last social commitments during his first visit to India and Pakistan since he was awarded the Nobel Prize, was visiting Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee. Shortly afterwards, Sen left to resume his academic engagements in Cambridge after his 17-day-long visit.

SEN's visit to Delhi helped inject an element of popular euphoria into an atmosphere that has had little to celebrate for long. When the euphoria subsided, there were the urgent matters of public policy that the man who has been described as the "conscience of the economics profession" impressed upon his audience. That Sen leaves behind a strong impression by the sheer strength of his personality is evident. But the jury is still out on whether he has concurrently moved the conscience of the political establishment towards greater sensitivity to the poor.