April 6, 2003

The book under review has been co-authored by the Nobel prize-winning economist Professor Amartya Sen and his Delhi- based colleague, Jean Dreze. They explore the role of public action in eliminating deprivation and expanding human freedom in India. The research, amongst other things, highlights the importance of primary education, provision of basic health services, gender equality and other social goals as tools to overcome poverty. Although specific to India, the book has a broader relevance for the entire subcontinent.

As the authors point out in their introduction, “We are of course much concerned with economic development in particular. However, we cannot interpret economic development merely as expansion in the production of inanimate objects of convenience — the goods and services that are (as Aristotle put it) ‘merely useful and for the sake of something else’. We have to see what these goods and services do to the actual opportunities and freedoms of people, categorized according to class, gender, location, social status, and other relevant distinctions.”

The emphasis on the significance of freedoms as ends of development does not deny their importance also as means of development. Freedoms are of different types, and the claim here is that freedoms of distinct kinds tend to help the enhancement and consolidation of another. Democratic rights and civil rights give a person the opportunity to demand and insist on the fulfilment of economic rights.

This study is concerned basically with the opportunities that people have to improve the quality of their lives. Various economic arrangements, including the market mechanism, are of central importance to the presence or absence of ‘social opportunities’. Since there is, in economics, a tradition of identifying inequality with income distribution, it is important to acknowledge the case for being involved also with inequality of freedoms and opportunities. According to the authors there is another important reason for focusing on the issue of inequality of opportunities. This concerns the importance of participation in social change. The ability of people to participate in social decisions has been seen, particularly since the French revolution, as a valuable characteristic of good society. Indeed the subject of ‘social choice theory’, with its focus on the participation of members of the society in the making of social decisions, emerged as a discipline in the late eighteenth century.

The authors assert that participation is ultimately connected with the demands of equality. At the most immediate level, democratic participation requires the sharing and symmetry of basic political rights — to vote, to propagate and to criticize. Actual participation in political movements and public action, including the participation of women, can make a major difference to the agenda of governments and influence its priorities. Overcoming the inequalities of power associated with economic privilege is an important aspect of democracy in the full sense of the term. Women have often been very active in demanding and working for basic social change.

The record of economic and social development in India since independence, as indeed of the subcontinent, has been one of formidable environmental plunder. Forests have been decimated, groundwater tables have fallen, rivers and ponds are massively polluted, and the air that city dwellers breathe has grown increasingly noxious and foul.

Many of these deteriorating environmental trends are clearly linked with heightened economic activity i.e. industrial growth, increased energy consumption, more intensive irrigation, commercial felling of trees, and other such activities that tend to be linked with economic expansion. ‘Development’ is, thus, held responsible with some immediate plausibility, for the damage.

On the other side, environmental activists are often accused of being ‘anti-development’, since the advocates of accelerated growth often see environmentalists as being unwelcoming, (if not obstructive) of economic progress for fear of its adverse environmental impact. The authors stress that the collision course is not necessary as there is much mutuality between environment and development.

The human toll of wars in the twentieth century is huge considering that 250 wars have been fought (including the two world wars), causing more than 100 million deaths, “It is important to reflect on these facts as we enter the new millennium, which some expect, not without reason, to be ‘a short millennium’. The cold war has famously come to an end, the astonishing nuclear arsenal of the established powers is still in place ... From the uncontrolled barbarity of ‘collateral casualties’ to the precisely aimed savagery of ‘ethnic cleansing’, the march of killing and genocide is unstopped and unrestrained.”

The human toll of militarism also includes its adverse long- term effects on development and the quality of life. Armed conflicts have imposed intermittent — but recurrent — devastations on many, who had been otherwise on the road to some real progress.

On globalization the authors have a broader approach than that which has centred thus far on the liberalization of trade and investment. According to them the narrow focus does not do justice to the significance of the growing global connectedness and interdependence of societies. Around 1000 AD, the global spread of science, technology and mathematics changed the nature of the old world. Thus paper and printing, the kite and magnetic compass, the wheel barrow and the rotary fan, the crossbow and gunpowder, the clock and the iron chain suspension bridge were well-established and extensively used in China, but were practically unknown elsewhere. It is globalization that spread them across the world. Both the Renaissance, and later the European Enlightenment, were strongly influenced by the currents that had come from outside Europe in the preceding century.

The real problems raised by globalization do not, in fact, lie in globalization per se, but relate in one way or another to inequality — the disparities in affluence and in political, social and economic power.

The analysis, in this book, is based on a broad and integrated view of development, one that places great premium on well being and freedom rather than the standard indicators of economic growth. The authors have placed human agencies at the centre of economic activity, and have stressed the complementary roles of economic, social and political institutions in enhancing effective freedoms.

India: Development and Participation
By Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen
Oxford University Press, New Delhi. Available at OUP, Plot # 38, Sector 15, Korangi Industrial Area, Karachi
Tel: 111-693- 673
Email: ouppak@theoffice.net
Website: www.oup.com.pk
ISBN 019 565875 2
512pp. Rs600

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