Jan 18, 1999
|
|
|
|
Sen's China Syndrome Flawed strategies for India's war against poverty. By Subramanian Swamy THE AMARTYA SEN & JEAN DREZE OMNIBUS
The central theme of the Sen-Dreze Omnibus is this: economic liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, competitive markets are essential for India but should be complemented by simultaneous expansion of social opportunities for which state intervention is necessary. So, a good economic policy for India is one that harmonises what should be left to the market with what should be expected of government. Both market and government should strive to expand social opportunities. These are, of course, my words. In their words, it is as follows: "While the case for economic reforms may take good note of the diagnosis that India has too much government interference in some fields, it ignores the fact that India also has insufficient and ineffective government activity in many other fields, including basic education, health care, social security, land reform, and the promotion of social change." The authors state that Jawaharlal Nehru understood this but we did not implement his vision, hence we are in the mess that we are in today. Further, today's liberalisation programme also suffers from this lack of harmonisation. This message is really the only one of the Omnibus that is of any contemporary value to us Indians. Much of the rest of the materials, inferences and pontifications represent the mental transformation of Sen from a closet intellectual godfather of the Naxalites of St Stephens College in the '60s, and of an occasional revolutionary dropout from the Delhi School of Economics, to an impassioned social democrat. The single most important message of the Sen-Dreze volume is that of the need to harmonise economic reform through market solutions, with governmental intervention to expand social opportunities. This is a sermon we as thinking Indians do not need. The question is not what to do, but how to do it. The Sen-Dreze answer is: learn from Deng's China. In elaboration, the authors list six lessons that we ought to learn from today's China. Reading the six lessons, one thing is clear to me: the authors have studied China not as serious scholars but as jet-setting intellectuals. I am struck by the utter superficiality of the Sen-Dreze analysis. The authors conclude: "The Chinese experiences convincingly demonstrates that, properly supplemented, a thriving market economy can do a great deal to help the masses out of poverty". This is absurd. The Chinese are candidly grappling with precisely the opposite: the decline since reform in public health and social insurance facility, the rise of urban unemployment with industrial liberalisation, the decline of public investment in agriculture, the disrepair in irrigation systems and rural roadways that hitherto were financed by the communes, the widening urban-rural differential, rising inequality, more corruption. This may be a useful reference book or text for a south Asian economics course in a US university, but for us in India it offers nothing that we do not already know. Thus we need not be intimidated by Sen's Nobel prize. The 1997 Nobel laureates in economics lost all their prize money experimenting with their stock market theory on Wall Street. In Sen's case, it won't be his money that will be laid on the line. |
|
Issue Contents | Write to us | Subscriptions | Syndication BUSINESS TODAY | INDIA TODAY PLUS | COMPUTERS TODAY © Living Media India Ltd |
 |
 |
This book is actually a compendium of three older separate
monographs that have already been published much earlier. The first, Poverty and Famine,
authored by Amartya Sen alone, was published in 1981; the second monograph, Hunger and
Public Action, is of joint authorship and was published in 1989; the third, India:
Economic Development and Public Action, also jointly authored, was published in 1995. Even
so, the authors are clear that even if they had been asked to revise these dated studies
they would have written not much differently (p vi, preface by Jean Dreze). 
