Content area
Full Text
India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity. By Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp.292. 25. ISBN 019 829012 8
In a broad comparative analysis of India's economic development, Dreze and Sen have dealt with a wide range of issues in this book. The monograph begins with the observation that India's `overall success' in achieving Nehru's aim, of `ending of proverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity' (p.2; emphasis in the original) has been limited. They suggest that India has a great deal to learn, not only from the development experience of China, its giant neighbour, but also from stories of success achieved by a number of much smaller countries.
India's successes in industrialisation and agricultural production differentiate it from many other countries. By the same token, in other crucial areas of social development such as basic education and reduction of gender inequality, India lags behind countries such as Indonesia, Myanmar, Zimbabwe and Zambia. Moreover, even as there is much to learn from the experiences of other countries, India can look within too for lessons from some of its more progressive States such as Kerala and West Bengal.
A significant merit of this book lies in the link that the authors establish between economic development and social opportunity. Much of the debate on the liberalisation policies of recent governments has taken place between those who delink these two desiderata of development and argue the salience of the one at the expense of the other. Dreze and Sen, however, convincingly argue that the central challenge of economic development should be understood in terms of the need to expand social opportunities. Accordingly, they distinguish, in Chapter 2, between the `intrinsic importance of opportunities' and `the extensive instrumental role of individual opportunities in the promotion of other objectives'.
The authors identify education and health as the two public goods to which every individual is entitled - both for their intrinsic importance and for their enhancement of instrumental personal, instrumental social, instrumental process, and empowerment and distributive roles (pp.14ff.). The central task of the state is to provide the stimulus needed to help individuals realise their entitlements. It is not enough to promote 'negative' liberties (that is, liberty of `not being prevented from doing certain...