Sen and Bhagwati :Two visions of India – woolly and pragmatic

Anjan Roy

It is a fight between two absentee landlords over overlapping properties. They like observing their land from ivory towers, half the world away, through powerful telescopes.

If we take the observation posts to be Harvard and Columbia, the land as the abstract cerebral landscape of the Indian economy and the powerful telescopes as the megawatt intellects of Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati, what do we get? Something of the altercation that is being played out under media glare.

Teaming up with Jean Dreze and Arvind Panagriya, Sen and Bhagwati, respectively, have written two books recently about Indian economy and its management strategy.

Real time ‘connect’

But then, both Sen and Bhagwati, great names in economics, no doubt, are talking about their homeland which they left possibly half a century back. They have kept coming back year in year out, spent their time in their old haunts to reconnect and rejuvenate their contacts.

Will they now admit that they have been removed from the ground for far too long?

Can you really connect up with present-day India if you stay in US universities?

Can you really reconstruct the complexities of the Indian economy with a pencil and a piece of paper in hand sitting at your desk?

Same goal, different route

Obviously, Sen and Bhagwati both presume they know everything about Indian economy that needs to be known.

They are giving free advice to the government on how to run this country. Both presumably argue for the same goal: Lifting the standards of living of the ordinary Indian.

They differ on the route to achieve that. Sen believes that more state initiative in the social sectors should bring about greater welfare and benefit to the poorest people. Bhagwati argues that state should be rolled back and reforms made easier for the private sector to flourish, push up overall growth and thereby lift the fates of the poor.

There is one major difference, however. Where Sen does not see much virtue in high GDP growth figures, Bhagwati believes that it is the surest way of addressing the question of poverty.

From their different perspectives, while one finds recent Indian growth experience as, proverbially, a half empty glass, the other sees it half full.

As a corollary, Sen believes that Narendra Modi kind of improvement, which had addressed the question of improvement of basic business functioning and infrastructure, as not being of great value. Bhagwati attaches importance and virtue to that kind of improvement, possibly. On the basis of ground-level experience, Bhagwati seems more practical and closer to the ground reality than Sen.

In his Himalayan humanitarianism, Sen has unlimited empathy for the sufferings of the poor in India. From the distance of Columbia University, Bhagwati sees that a better working condition for businesses in India could create more self-sustained and stable income for the poor, which might be of greater help than hand-outs under MNREGA, free hospitals and free government schools. Not even free laptops from Akhilesh Yadav could make much of a difference.

Modi vs Mamata

Indeed, the results are all to see. Modi is not a one-time phenomenon in Gujarat. Modi is a mindset. The mindset of Gujarat and Maharashtra, under pro-private sector political establishment, has produced far better results than the statism of West Bengal for the last 40 years. West Bengal, which had once one of the highest number of factory workers, have now far fewer of them than Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu or Karnataka.

In his book, Sen has debunked Indian ruling class as elitist by caste, gender, income and education, being casual and careless about the fate of the poor. How can he expect more public outlay on health or education to deliver results under the guidance of the ruling elites? And on ground, this elitist ruling class has always sworn by the poor, including the latest move of the National Food Security Bill.

In contrast, Mamata Banerjee would have been the ideal ruler by the Sen gauge as being female, doubtfully educated, professedly poor, coming from a lower middle-class background — even for being possibly a prime ministerial candidate.

As West Bengal chief minister, she has been successful in further pushing poverty in the State by creating unemployment. The few who could have been employed had the Tata factory in Singur come alive, and land holders in the area, who had been promised the moon by her, today are fuming with rage.

We have seen too much of aloof humanitarianism; a bit of hard core practical sense will perhaps do us better.

(The author is a Delhi-based commentator.)