India, usually, has too adulatory an attitude to anyone that claims a blood connection to this country and has become successful elsewhere. We beg them to pontificate on anything they like, treasuring every last statement as the word of God. Even V S Naipaul, the least trustworthy observer of anything in all of recorded history, is treated with groan-inducing reverence. Recently, however, I've seen the first sign of that consensus cracking. The fact that the first target of this new assertiveness is Amartya Sen is both darkly amusing and puzzling.
I heard the other day that Sen, together with his long-time collaborator and former member of the National Advisory Council, Jean Dreze, is about to release a new book. Judging by an op-ed he wrote in The New York Times a few days ago, the book will just repeat the old and quite straightforward point that India, despite an average of relatively high growth, continues to fail at providing public services to its citizens. Sen and Dreze have been hammering away at this since at least 1995, and their book India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity. Their view has become mainstream in Indian politics and policy, and for good reason: there should be nothing controversial about saying economic growth is a single metric, and not an end in itself; the point of economic policy is increasing citizens' well-being; and thus that boosting growth is a necessary but not sufficient condition for good economic policy. And since at least 2001, Sen has warned that India's neighbours (except for Pakistan) in spite of being in many cases torn by war, have done better at transforming growth into improved development indicators. Again, this is not controversial. The only real criticism is that Sen says it so often it has gotten boring, though not, sadly, any less true.
Yet, when I heard this new book was coming out, I knew instantly that it would be the focus of considerable attacks. Let's leave Dreze aside for the moment; much though I admire him, he has always been an activist economist, willing to pick unfair fights (such as noisily hanging around outside the Planning Commission with the amount of food that you can buy for Rs 32). Sen, however, doesn't really indulge in that sort of debate. Recently, for example, he made an unexceptionable statement about the media coverage of the disruption of Parliament: that it should point out the costs of not passing legislation. The particular case he had in mind? The food security Bill. I don't agree with much of what's in the Bill. Neither does Sen, I suspect, if for different reasons. But Sen is entitled to point out that, in the absence of proper food security, people are dying. That's exactly the sort of reminder we need of how urgent this debate is - but, somehow that elementary point caused people to explode with righteous indignation.
I don't just mean Sen's old antagonists Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya, two Columbia University economists whose own excellent work and arguments, particularly on malnutrition, are frequently overshadowed by a very personal animus for Sen that undermines what they have to say. On television, on Twitter, and in the opinion pages of newspapers, Sen was widely lambasted - and frequently in ways that warped reality much more than Sen had.
The best examples came unfortunately from an economist I greatly admire, Swaminathan Aiyar, who has written three pieces on Sen recently in The Economic Times and The Times of India. In one, he attacked Sen's televised, offhand attempt to add numbers to his "people are dying" claim. Unfortunately, the number of dying children Sen claimed was 10,000 a week; Aiyar poured scorn over it nevertheless - in spite of the fact that the head of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation estimated that number worldwide as 18,000 a day, with the majority from India. I think that's wrong - but Sen's is hardly massively exaggerating figures purely for effect, given his claim was considerably lower than the UN head's.
Sadly, Sen's restraint is rarely matched by those disagreeing with him. To attack Sen's penchant for figures, Aiyar also claimed that Sen had been shown to get the number of "missing women" owing to gender discrimination-caused excess female deaths wrong. (Sen had claimed 100 million missing girls across the world.) Aiyar, unfortunately, relied on work by the economist Emily Oster - work which, in a much-publicised incident, she then had to withdraw because of a basic error, leaving Sen in possession of the field. In another piece this week, Aiyar attacked Sen for pushing Kerala's social development indicators as worthwhile of emulation. Look instead at Kerala's crime rates, he said, specifically crimes against women. He did note that crimes against women tend to be under-reported - but said, even so, Kerala's rates are "uncomfortably high", implying Sen's beloved "Kerala model" didn't solve women's problems. In particular, he mentioned that Kerala reports 2.9 rapes per 100,000 population, well above the national average, arguing against the difference being entirely better reporting. Really? A conservative estimate for the equivalent rate for the US is 0.3 per thousand. That's 30 per 100,000. Thir-ty. Ten times more. Is that an argument against the "US model"? Or a reminder that rape statistics in India are useful only as a sign of how well a government responds to women's complaints?
Don't get me wrong: I think it's good news that Sen is being held to account for his prescriptions; after all, they've been a big influence on the welfarist turn of our major political parties. But given the tone and quality of the arguments being marshalled against his influence, I don't expect Sen to be dethroned just yet.
mihir.sharma@bsmail.in
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