The roses are blooming outside the window in the immaculately kept gardens of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Amartya Sen is comfortably ensconced in a cream armchair facing shelves of his neatly catalogued writings.
There are plenty of reasons for satisfaction as he approaches his 80th birthday. Few intellectuals have combined academic respect and comparable influence on global policy.
Few have garnered such an extensive harvest of accolades: in addition to his Nobel Prize and more than 100 honorary degrees, last year he became the first non-United States citizen to be awarded the National Humanities Medal.
But Sen doesn’t do satisfaction. He does outrage, expressed in the most reasonable possible terms. What he wants to know is where more than 600-million Indians go to defecate.
“Half of all Indians have no toilet. In Delhi, when you build a new condominium, there are lots of planning requirements but none relating to the servants having toilets.
It’s a combination of class, caste and gender discrimination. It’s absolutely shocking.
The plight of the poor
“Poor people have to use their ingenuity and, for women, that can mean only being able to relieve themselves after dark, with all the safety issues that entails,” says Sen, adding that Bangladesh is much poorer than India and yet only 8% don’t have access to a toilet. “This is India’s defective development.”
Despite all the comfort and prestige of his status in the United Kingdom and the US (he teaches at Harvard), he hasn’t forgotten the plight of India’s poor, which he first witnessed as a small child during the Bengal famine of 1943.
His new book, An Uncertain Glory, co-written with his long-time colleague Jean Dreze, is a quietly excoriating critique of India’s boom.
It’s the 50% figure that, shockingly, keeps recurring: 50% of children are stunted, the vast majority due to undernourishment; 50% of women have anaemia for the same reason.
In one survey, there was no evidence of any teaching activity in 50% of schools in seven big northern states, which explains terrible academic underachievement.
Despite considerable economic growth and increasing self-confidence as a major global player, today’s India is a disaster zone in which millions of lives are wrecked by hunger and by pitiable investment in health and education services.
“Pockets of California in sub-Saharan Africa”
The description “pockets of California in sub-Saharan Africa” sums up Sen and Dreze’s work.
Sen and Dreze are losing patience (they have collaborated on several previous books) and their last chapter is titled The Need for Impatience.
They want attention, particularly from the vast swath of the Indian middle classes who seem indifferent to the wretched lives of their neighbours.
So they have aimed their critique at India’s national self-respect by drawing unfavourable comparisons, firstly, with its great rival, China, but even more embarrassingly, with a string of South Asian neighbours.
“There are reasons for India to hang its head in shame. Alongside the success, there have been gigantic failures,” says Sen.
He is making this critique loud and clear in the media on both sides of the Atlantic before the book’s launch in India this week.
Comparisons
“India will prick up its ears when comparisons with China are made but the comparison is not just tactical. China invested in massive expansion of education and healthcare in the 1970s so that, by 1979, life expectancy was 68 while in India it was only 54.”
Sen and Dreze’s argument is that these huge social investments have proved critical to sustaining China’s impressive economic growth. Without comparable foundations, India’s much-lauded economic growth is faltering.
Furthermore, they argue that India’s overriding preoccupation with economic growth makes no sense without recognising that human development depends on how that wealth is used and distributed.
What’s the purpose, Dreze and Sen ask, of a development model that produces luxury shopping malls rather than sanitation systems that ensure millions of healthy lives?
India is caught in the absurd paradox of people having mobile phones but no toilets. Even more stark is the comparison with Bangladesh.
“Our hope is that India’s public policymakers will be embarrassed by the comparison with Bangladesh. On a range of development indicators such as life expectancy, child immunisation and child mortality, Bangladesh has pulled ahead of India, despite being poorer.”
Women position
What makes this comparison so powerful is that Bangladesh has targeted the position of women not just through government policy but also through the work of nongovernmental organisations.
There have been astonishing successes, says Sen: a dramatic fall in the fertility rate and girls now outnumbering boys in education.
After the blizzard of facts and figures with which the book is stuffed, one might fear reader despair but the reverse is true. This is a book about what India could do — and should do.
Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh are held up as good examples of how social investments from the 1960s to the 1980s have reaped dividends in economic growth.
What holds India back is not a lack of resources but a lack of clear-sighted long-term policies and the political will to implement them.
Sen (still an Indian citizen) is optimistic, pointing to the political mobilisation following the rape of a young woman student on a bus in Delhi last December, which led to the rapid adoption of new measures to combat violence against women. The consciences of the Indian middle classes can be stirred.
Argument not won yet
What underpins the book is a deep faith in human reason, the roots of which he traces to India’s long argumentative tradition.
If enough evidence and analysis is brought to bear on this subject then one can win the argument, and it is this faith that has sustained him through more than five decades of writing on human development.
It was his work that led to the development of the much-cited United Nations human development index.
Influential he has certainly been, but Sen acknowledges he still hasn’t won the argument.
He is an extraordinary academic by any account — a member of both the philosophy and the economics faculties at Harvard — and is helping to develop a new course on maths while supervising PhDs in law and public health. He has plans for several more books and no plans to slow down.
The mastery of many academic disciplines is rare enough but it’s the dogged ethical preoccupation threading through all his work that is really remarkable.
Rabindranath Tagore
Some see Sen as the last heir to a distinguished Bengali intellectual tradition that owed as much to poets as it did to scientists, politicians and philosophers. Sen is the true inheritor of Rabindranath Tagore, the great poet and thinker of the early 20th century.
A family friend, he named Sen as a baby. The only photograph in Sen’s Cambridge study is that of the Tagore with his flowing white beard.
On one issue, Sen says he parts company with Tagore. He quotes Kazi Nazrul Islam, Bengal’s other great poet who became an iconic figure for the nation of Bangladesh. Tagore was too patient; Nazrul was the rebel urging action.
Sen repeats a quote he uses in the book: “Patience is a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.” — © Guardian News & Media 2013