India ignores education, health: Sen

NEW YORK, Oct 15 (IANS) — Economics Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has said the basic problem with India is that it has ignored education, health care and other aspects of "social opportunity building."

At a hurriedly-called press conference here after the announcement of the Nobel Prize, Sen said in India’s case the problem was not with the pace or process of opening up the economy — which he noted was not fast paced — but "the continued neglect of education and aspects of social opportunity building."

"The question is: what is the overall programme which includes opportunity building on which market expansion can be built?" he said.

India and Pakistan, Sen said, had neglected education, health care and land reform "in a truly regrettable way and that means that when the economies opened up, a lot of people are not able to compete in the global world."

While conceding that the process of globalisation was inevitable, Sen felt it can be a "major force for good" only when "adequately backed by national policies."

Sen (64), whose award was announced in the early hours of yesterday, is in New York to give a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) lecture today.

Sen, formerly at Harvard but now Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, his alma mater, said he was "particularly happy" that the Nobel committee in Stockholm had identified his early work at Delhi University on social choice and welfare economics.

This year’s economics award is particularly significant as it gives recognition to Sen’s contributions to "welfare economics" rather than to mechanisms of international finance and investment as in the last two years.

Sen has also worked closely with the UNDP in constructing the concepts behind the annual human development report. "The concept of human development is deeply rooted in Professor Sen’s work," said Gustave Speth, chief of UNDP.

"It goes beyond looking at economic growth as the sole indicator of a nation’s progress and looks also at the expansion of people’s choices and their capacity to live long, healthy, knowledgeable and satisfying lives."

While the 1943 Bengal famine fuelled the fire of his inquiring mind, Sen said his stint at the Delhi School of Economics was among his most rewarding.

The Bengal-born economist reminisced at length the effects that the 1943 famine had on him as a nine-year-old child when he witnessed the sudden appearance of emaciated hordes of people who died. "It touched me personally — it’s a very shaking experience about society," he said. "It made me think about the politics of human society, specifically about what causes famines."

He wrote for the school newspaper about how there was no food shortage and yet people were dying.

"Famine is a very divisive phenomenon," Sen emphasised, clarifying that on the outside, barely 10 per cent of people are affected by a famine and closer to 3 to 5 per cent are particularly badly affected even though absolute numbers may be large. Famines did not depend on food supply but rather on the purchasing power of the people, he said.

"If you reflect on countries having famines currently, these are countries without a democratic government," he said, adding he was sorry to see his predictions of 16 years ago coming true.

He quoted the example of China where during the Great Leap Forward which went awry, between 1958 and 1962 some ten million died each year while the government was misinformed due to local administration’s efforts to cover up famine conditions.

"There were no elections, no media," he said. "The rulers had no incentive to change it. In this case it was not so much greed but political dogmatism," he said about China’s failure to reverse the Great Leap policy. He characterised the absence of democracy as a violation of human economic rights as well.

Asked about the various academic positions he held in his life, Sen fondly recalled the Delhi School of Economics where he said "I had some of my finest students" and the work for which he is recognised by the Nobel committee was done. "India is the place where there is a great deal of good work" in this field, he said. "Many of my best students are there, and my best students’ students and their students, I am proud to say."

Asked what he would do with the prize money of close to one million dollars, Sen said he had not given it any thought. When woken at his hotel at 5 a.m., Sen said his immediate worry was that one of his children was in trouble somewhere in the world. But on hearing that he had been awarded the Nobel, he relaxed and "when the news finally sunk in, I was quite happy," he said in his usual understated style.

Over the years, Sen has spoken out on human rights issues and also focussed attention on the statistical and very real disappearance of girl children in developing countries like India and China where parents prefer male children for social and economic reasons. Considered one of the foremost minds in economics, Sen was rumoured to be in the running for the Nobel last year.

His areas of economics, he noted, "are often neglected in media coverage and yet are very important for social reasons," and added that many of his colleagues were working on poverty issues. The Nobel award, he said, "is a signal for me that their works are also being honoured."

When people come to know he is an economist, they occasionally ask him how they should invest their money and "I say I haven’t got a clue," Sen laughed.

The tall and lean intellectual said it was true that some of the Nobel awards in recent years had been concerned with other economic issues — such as finance — which are also important, "but there is another side to economics and I’m very pleased that they focussed on that this year. So they are pointing to the fact that economics is also concerned with the poor and the underdog in society."

A considerable amount of Sen’s early work of 20 years on social choice theory is based on mathematical models.

"By analysing the available information about different individuals’ welfare when collective decisions are made, he (Sen) has improved the theoretical foundation for comparing different distributions of society’s welfare and defined new, and more satisfactory, indexes of poverty," the Nobel Academy said in its release.

Sen’s work has advanced the understanding of the economic mechanisms of famines. Sen has also done significant research on Kerala’s political economy and given a fresh look to comparative studies of that state with East Asian and the Chinese economies.