Amartya Sen: India's dirty fighter


?The Guardian

The roses are blooming at the window in the immaculately kept gardens of Trinity College, Cambridge and Amartya Sen is comfortably ensconced in a cream armchair facing shelves of his neatly catalogued writings. There are plenty of reasons for satisfaction as he approaches his 80th birthday. Few intellectuals have combined academic respect and comparable influence on global policy. Few have garnered quite such an extensive harvest of accolades: in addition to his?Nobel prize?and more than 100 honorary degrees, last year he became the first non-US citizen to be awarded the?National Medal for the Humanities.
An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions by Jean Dreze, Amartya Sen
“Half of all Indians have no toilet. In Delhi when you build a new condominium there are lots of planning requirements but none relating to the servants having toilets. It’s a combination of class, caste and gender discrimination. It’s absolutely shocking. Poor people have to use their ingenuity and for women that can mean only being able to?relieve themselves after dark with all the safety issues that entails,” says Sen, adding that Bangladesh is much poorer than?India?and yet only 8% don’t have access to a toilet. “This is India’s defective development.”
Despite all the comfort and prestige of his status in the UK and the US ? he teaches at Harvard ? he hasn’t forgotten the urgency of the plight of India’s poor, which he first witnessed as a small child in the midst of?the Bengal famine of 1943. His new book,?An Uncertain Glory, co-written with his long-time colleague Jean Dr?ze, is a quietly excoriating critique of India’s boom.
The details are outrageous but the outlines of this story are familiar and Sen and Dr?ze are losing patience (they have collaborated on?several previous books) and their last chapter is entitled The Need for Impatience. They want attention, particularly from the vast swath of the Indian middle classes who seem indifferent to the wretched lives of their neighbours. So they have aimed their critique at India’s national?amour-propreby drawing unfavourable comparisons, firstly with the great rival China but even more embarrassingly with a string of south Asian neighbours.
indian slum?An Indian boy defecates in the open in one of New Delhi’s slums. Photograph: AP Photo/Kevin Frayer”
What makes this comparison so powerful is that Bangladesh has targeted the position of women not just through government policy but also through the work of non-governmental organisations such as?BRAC?and the?Grameen Bank. As a result, there have been astonishing successes, says Sen, such as a dramatic fall in fertility rate and girls now outnumbering boys in education. All this has been achieved despite having half the per capita income of India.
India, Kathputli?Street scene in Delhi’s Kathputli colony, where the houses have no running water, electricity or sanitation. Photograph: Donatella Giagnori/LatinContent/Getty Images
After this blizzard of facts and figures ? and the book is stuffed with them ? one might fear reader despair, but the reverse is true. This is a book about what India could do ? and should do. Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh are held up as good examples of how social investments from the 60s to the 80s have reaped dividends in economic growth. What holds India back is not lack of resources but lack of clear-sighted, long-term policies and the political will to implement them. Sen (still an Indian citizen) is optimistic, pointing to?the political mobilisation?following the rape of a young woman student on a bus in Delhi last December, which led to the rapid adoption of new measures to combat violence against women. The consciences of the Indian middle classes can be stirred, and, when they are, political action follows.
He is an extraordinary academic by any account ? a member of both the philosophy and the economics faculties at Harvard ? and is helping to develop a new course on maths while supervising PhDs in law and public health. He has plans for several more books and no plans to slow down. Mastery of multiple academic disciplines is rare enough but it’s the dogged ethical preoccupation threading through all his work that is really remarkable. None of the erudition is used to intimidate; he is always the teacher.
Some argue that Sen is the last heir to?a distinguished Bengali intellectual tradition?that owed as much to poets as it did to scientists, politicians and philosophers. Sen is the true inheritor of?Rabindranath Tagore, the great poet and thinker of the early decades of the 20th century. A family friend, he named Sen as a baby; the only photograph in Sen’s Cambridge study is that of the striking Tagore with his flowing white beard.

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