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People's Power is the best antidote for bad policies

Amartya Sen, widely recognised as India's finest economist, has just been appointed head of Trinity College at Cambridge, the first Indian to be accorded this honour. When he was in India last month, Professor Sen was awarded the 1997 Indian Chamber of Commerce Lifetime Achievement Award. He used that occasion to reflect on the state of the Indian economy. A fascinating analysis from an economist, who is a front-runner to win the Nobel Prize for Economics this year.

India is politically much richer as a result of its democracy, but does it pay an economic price for it, as it has sometimes been alleged? While it has frequently been claimed that democracy is inimical to fast economic growth (India itself has been quoted often enough to illustrate this specious thesis), there is little statistical evidence to confirm this, as various empirical studies have confirmed. Indeed, even the limited success of India in recent years in raising economic growth shows that economic growth profits more from a friendly economic climate than from an oppressive political environment.

India has certainly benefitted from the protective role of democracy in giving the rulers excellent political incentive to act supportively when disasters threaten and when an immediate change in policy is imperative.

India has successfully avoided famines since Independence, while China experienced a massive famine during the failure of the Great Leap Forward, when faulty policies were not revised for three years while famine mortality took 23 to 30 million lives. Indira Gandhi's brief attempt at suppressing basic political and civil rights, and initiating such coercive policies as compulsory sterilisation, in the 1970s, was firmly rejected by the voters, thereby electorally ending that government. Even today, India is in a better position than China both to prevent abuse of coercive power and to make quicker emendations if and when policies go badly wrong.

Democracy gives an opportunity for the Opposition to press for policy change even when the problem is chronic rather than acute and disastrous. So the weakness of Indian social policies on education, health care, land reform and gender equity is as much a failure of the Opposition parties as of the governments in office. Commitments of political leaders of other countries have often achieved more in these fields than the working of Indian democracy. The educational and health achievements of Maoist China illustrate this well. Post-reform China has made excellent use of this accomplishment in its market-based expansion.

This is not an argument for discounting democracy. Rather, it is a strong pointer to the need to practice democracy more fully. Instead of hoping to get, perhaps accidentally, good and visionary leadership under authoritarians, which is a matter of 'hit and miss' with terrible consequences when there is a miss, democracy makes it possible to use public participation to ensure attention to the needs of people.

But it is up to us to make the best use of the opportunities that democracy offers. If, for example, we want to get more social development (basic education, health care, and so on), more gender equity, a less stratified society, and a less expensive military, it is for us to agitate for these things. In politics, as much as in economics, demand is an important influence on supply.

Issues of social equity have been politicised in rather partial ways in different parts of India. North India seems very heavily concentrated on quite a limited range of issues related to 'reservations' and the settling of privileges connected with diverse caste backgrounds. The latter is not a negligible matter on its own, but still quite far removed from the general public interest in health, education and so on. Politicisation has occurred in West Bengal in some fields (such as land reforms, local self-government and removal of rural disparities in power), but not yet in others (including, by and large, in health care and educational gaps).

The state of Kerala is perhaps the clearest example where the need for universal education, basic health care, elementary gender equity and land reforms has received systematic and effective politicisation. The explanation involves both history and contemporary development: the educational orientation of Kerala's anti-upper caste movements (of which the current leftwing politics of Kerala is successor), missionary activities in the spread of education (not confined only to Christians), early initiatives of the native kingdoms of Travancore and Cochin (outside the direct rule of the British raj), openness to the outside world (including the influence of early Christians, Jewish immigrants, and Arab traders, among others), and also better placed positions of women in property rights for a substantial and influential section of the community -- the Nairs, to be specific.

Kerala has improved the quality of life of women and men quite dramatically. For example, it has achieved a life expectancy at birth of 71 years (74 years for women). It is close to universal literacy (certainly among younger age groups). And its fertility rate has fallen sharply to 1.8, which is below the replacement rate (and rather similar to fertility rates in the United Kingdom and France, and lower than what China has achieved even with compulsion in birth control).

Many of the achievements related to greater gender equality, since women's decisional power seems to favour the lowering of mortality rates (especially for children), encouragement to further expansion of literacy, and a reduction in the birth rate (since the lives that are most battered by over frequent bearing the rearing of children are those of young women).

Amartya Sen, continued