Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Economics Prize, 1998. Pic Courtesy: Outlook Magazine
‘Tis the Nobel season anyways, and while we are yakking up Obama and his Nobel Peace Prize, here is another winner. Albeit for economics, and from another year. Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998 for his work in welfare economics. While I have never had the stomach to digest his massive tome The Argumentative Indian, I did manage to read through his interview with Vinod Mehta in Outlook magazine.
Asked how many cheers he would give Indian democracy, Sen replied he would give it more than two and somewhere less than three. “If you take the view, is democracy functioning as well as it could, it may even be one. But given the adversities we have had—a very poor country, largely illiterate, border wars with China and Pakistan, with Pakistan going its peculiarly difficult way, the relationship problems that we have had with the United States and the global powers—have we done as well as expected? Yes. Except in one big respect, namely that I had expected that non-dramatic deprivations would receive more attention than they ended up getting. Famines did go away with democracy, as I had expected, but I thought other things like gender inequality and the huge undernourishment of children would get more attention, but they did not get enough. That’s the disappointment.”
Famines did go away with democracy, as I had expected, but I thought other things like gender inequality and the huge undernourishment of children would get more attention, but they did not get enough. That’s the disappointment.
On Prakash Karat’s (General Secretary of the Communist Party of India) ridiculous statement that Cuba is a good role model for India, Amartya Sen laughs and says that there are things to learn from Cuba about health-care and basic education, not about democracy and not about media freedom. He notes that it is a very unfree country. Sen also points out there are things to learn from America, but not about medical care for the masses , adding there is no country that provides us with a model.
Read Amartya Sen’s full interview here.
