Amartya took his concern for society forward: K. N. Raj

AMARTYA SEN once wrote to me in reply to my response to his book Poverty and Famine: "I have never had the illusion that I was saying something that had not been said before. But I did think that I was saying things that could have saved some lives if they were reflected in policy. To use Ashok Mitra's phrase, if our great-grandmothers ran governments, they would have saved many lives indeed."

This is a statement typical of Amartya and in a way is a reflection of his important contribution. Because, as I told him, I think that most of the things that welfare economists talk about are those that are obvious to all of us, especially the common people. In fact, even a pure philosopher and religious thinker like Sree Narayana Guru, who achieved a social transformation in Kerala, spoke about the very same things that welfare economists speak about today: education, health care facilities, even small-scale industries. But economic theory was all about how production is organised and so on, and not about how it affects the welfare of the community or a particular segment of the community.

Earlier economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Robert Malthus and Karl Marx were indeed concerned about society. However, after Marx, conservative economists perhaps thought it better to leave all these problems aside and concentrate on what is called the pure theory of value and distribution. It had nothing to do with institutions. This trend was somewhat altered by people like John Maynard Keynes, because they were concerned about the problem of unemployment. Amartya took this concern for society forward, and when speaking about its practical side he always referred to India in general, and Kerala in particular. In fact, he claimed, and he did demonstrate, that Kerala had done much better than China in some fields of development.

Amartya has always been very sensitive about the question of famine, because he himself grew up at the time of the Bengal famine. He was struck by the absolute helplessness of the people some of whom having travelled distances died right outside his house. That experience made a very deep impression on him. He went on to study the question of famine and demonstrated that it did not always occur owing to shortage of food, but it was a question of distribution as well. This is where questions of welfare come in, obvious questions like "if distribution of food was proper, why should only some people die?"

Amartya showed how in China, a Communist country much concerned about distribution, lack of information became the real reason for the famine of late 1950s. Officials and the media were trained to report only what was good, and Beijing had no clue that there was a famine.

C. RATHEESH KUMAR

Amartya referred always to the comparisons between the famine in China and in Bengal. In the latter case, it was really a question of distribution, black-marketing and so on - events governed by market principles. Because he saw the terrible effects of famine as a child, it was natural for him to investigate the Chinese famine as well. He fished out the truth, which was unwelcome to the Chinese. He showed that the important determinants of entitlement in that context were political pressure and administrative force and, negatively, the authority's ability to suppress information by keeping the stories of starvation out of the newspapers.

Amartya once wrote to me: "If the government can 'afford' to have famines, then in a poor country from time to time it will have famines, since it will not be forced to organise relief and, if necessary, import food from abroad, and it could continue to carry on its insensitive policy with quiet dogmatism."

Amartya is not a Marxist. But he is sympathetic to Marxists because Marxists have been concerned about the poor. Many people like me practised welfare economics without knowing that it was welfare economics, because we were anxious that economics should help the poor. But people who take economic theory literally would say that this is not our problem. Amartya was very good at theory. He went along with that. But he very quickly understood the limitations of that kind of pure theory.

His welfare theory goes into the realm of philosophy. Most economists are not like that anymore, although the fundamental contribution of Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, was the book Theory of Moral Sentiments. That was, however, forgotten by neo-classical economists who had nothing to do with moral sentiments. Perhaps, that reduces their theoretical rigour. How will you make a theory in morality? You cannot make a model out of morality!

Amartya is a superb teacher; he is one of the best I have known. At the Delhi School of Economics (DSE), where Amartya joined as a fellow teacher, his classroom always overflowed with students from other classes. There was no need for taking attendance and Amartya always considered it an absolute waste of time. When our department finally put up a proposal for doing away with the practice of taking attendance, there was opposition from every other department. However, the Vice-Chancellor, C.D. Deshmukh, being a civil servant who knew how to manage rules, allowed our department alone to discontinue the practice. In Amartya Sen's case, and for all of us in the department, it made no difference at all.

The DSE was at the peak of its popularity and was one of the strongest departments in the world when it had Amartya, Jagdish Bhagwati and Sukhamoy Chakravarty. The DSE celebrates its golden jubilee on November 14, and if they invite Amartya I am sure he will attract a huge crowd.

Amartya was very closely linked with the Tagore family. I think it is because of this factor that despite the difficulties involved in getting his passport renewed frequently (because he travels a lot) he remains an Indian citizen. Once, when my wife asked him whether he had changed his citizenship, he got very angry and said: "Sarasamma, how dare you ask such a question?" That is why I used to say that he is one of the few "fanatic" Indians that I know. Amartya is a delightful person to know. We were neighbours in our DSE days, and our families also got to know each other very well.

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