Book Tip No. 68 (2024): Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen: India. A Country and Its Contradictions
Munich 2024.
By Hans-Christian Riekhof
India has just overtaken China as the most populous country in the world, and India has a significantly younger population and thus a major demographic advantage. India’s economic growth has also clearly outpaced China’s in recent years, although it should not be forgotten that India’s GDP today is only about a fifth of China’s GDP.
Nobel laureate Amartya Sen – who is of Indian origin – and his long-time collaborator Jean Drèze turn their attention in their book to the development and internal contradictions of Indian society (and this is a rather benevolent description).
India’s upswing benefits only a very small part of society: “The history of global development offers, if at all, few other examples of an economy whose rapid growth over such a long period of time alleviated human suffering to such a small extent.” (p. 9).
This is the authors’ main concern: to highlight India’s fundamental societal backwardness in terms of education, schooling and literacy, corruption and institutions, healthcare and nutrition, the role of women in Indian society, the general development of living standards, energy supply, poverty reduction and social support.
The authors often draw the – for India unflattering – comparison to China, but also to Bangladesh, two countries that can show enormous progress in almost all of the mentioned development areas. They analyze these topics very knowledgeably and underpin their analyses with detailed empirical data.
Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen also have some concrete suggestions and advice on how India could make faster progress in the mentioned areas. Some Indian states are significantly more successful in terms of societal development and the reduction of severe disadvantages – there is a lot to learn from them.
They analyze the functioning of India’s democratic institutions and conclude that interest groups and lobbyists have a (too) large influence on democratic decision-making processes. They also point to the role of the Indian media and their one-sided and selective portrayal of societal developments. The poor performance of India in terms of improving the living standards of the broad population finds, according to Drèze and Sen, no appropriate echo in the media.
The government’s spending policy also receives critical appraisal. The ratio of tax revenue to GDP is very low in India compared to international standards, and according to Drèze and Sen, largely wrong priorities are set. Subsidies for gasoline and fertilizers reach four times the expenditure for healthcare. And the tax exemptions for gold and diamonds reach a level of more than 5% of Indian GDP- this money is then obviously missing for education and other tasks.
If there have been improvements in terms of equality and justice in India in recent years, then this is due to the independence of the judiciary and also the Supreme Court – institutions that have obviously given important positive impulses for the further development of Indian society – a societal force that we would not find in the same form in China.
Anyone who wants to understand India’s past and expected societal and economic development cannot avoid dealing with the work of Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen. It is definitely worth it.