Ivory tower prescription

An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions by Amartya Sen & Jean Dreze; Penguin; Price: Rs.399; 434 pp This widely discussed book examines the strange contradiction that even as during the past two decades following the liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy in 1991, the country has recorded among the worlds highest annual rates of GDP growth, the standard of living of the great majority of citizens measured by social indicators — education, health, infant mortality — has plunged to new lows. Jean Dreze, professor of sociology at Delhi University and pro-poor human rights activist, and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen are outraged — and rightly so — that even bottom-of-the-ladder countries such as Bangladesh have surpassed India on many telling human development indicators. They lament the near-silence of the intelligentsia and media about a growth process that is so biased, making the country look more and more like islands of Calif-ornia in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa. Your reviewer cannot claim to have grasped the finer nuances of the premier social science that is economics to the extent of the eminent authors of this tome. Nevertheless a good grasp of fundamentals — an awareness that land, labour, capital and enterprise are prime factors of production whose optimal utilisation determine the prosperity of nations and societies — has stood me in good stead. In the circumstances its astonishing that the authors with their intellect and creativity, have barely touched on the role of the fourth factor of production, viz, enterprise. Although Dreze-Sen claim to derive considerable satisfaction from the Indian economy having leapt out of the rut of the so-called Hindu rate of economic growth (3.5 percent per year), there is no acknowledgement that the economy accelerated due to the fourth factor of production — enterprise/entrepreneurship — after being partially released from the chains of the licence-permit-quota regimen. Nor is there unequivocal endorsement that more reforms are needed to encourage private enterprise to restore the growth momentum of the economy. On the contrary, Dreze-Sen seem to believe that greater accountability within government and public sector enterprises (PSEs), which still dominate the commanding heights of the Indian economy, is the answer to maintaining high GDP growth. However no proposals are offered on how to extract greater accountability to attain the desideratum of improved  productivity within the countrys thoroughly inefficient and corrupt PSEs and 18-million strong (Centre plus states) bureaucracy, which are draining the life blood of the Indian economy. The obvious solution to this endemic problem is to abate, if not eliminate cronyism and corruption. This requires more police, courts, judges, an autonomous CBI and Lok Pal among other law, order and justice reforms. But neither anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare nor the independent Lok Pal (ombudsman) movement which convulsed the nation last year, find any mention in this volume. Although Dreze-Sen are well aware that less than four centuries ago the subcontinent was one of the wealthiest regions of the world where workers wages were higher than in Europe, they gloss…