India should emulate China: Sen

NEW DELHI, Jan 3: Nobel laureate Amartya Sen today said that India should emulate China in the areas of elementary education and economic...

NEW DELHI, Jan 3: Nobel laureate Amartya Sen today said that India should emulate China in the areas of elementary education and economic liberalisation. He was speaking at a function organised by the Vice-Chancellor and Executive Council members of Delhi University, after being conferred the Doctor of Letters degree this morning.

Sen said that in the field of economic reforms, India could learn a lot from China in “playing the economic game with great skill”. According to him, economic freedom and enabling freedom, which is the right to have basic education and health-care, are both important for the development of a country.

Economic freedom promotes efficiency and disallows monopolistic tendencies to rule, he said, adding that he was never against free market policies. “I am critical of the dogmatism of pro-market policies and not against free market economics,”Sen said. According to him, there are five types of freedom which are necessary for all States — enabling, transparency and protectivefreedom, in addition to political and economic freedom. One of his two forthcoming books, Development as Freedom, talks about these in detail. The professor said that in this work, he has argued that freedom should not be restrained by the tyranny of alleged tradition. The other book is on Social Choice Theory and Freedom which Sen said is of a technical nature.

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He added that there are no perfect models for India to follow, as every country has its own faults in some area or the other. On political freedom, the renowned economist said that India is an active democratic state and does not need to model itself on any other country. Citing the importance of democracy, the Nobel laureate said that the absence of political freedom in China had been highlighted during the famine of 1958-61. “Democracy was really missed during the period,” he said, adding that in the future as well, the importance of democracy would come to the fore only when things went wrong.

Sen pointed out that anotherimportant area was transparency freedom or the right to know that transactions are transparent, the lack of which led to the east Asian crisis. “Transparency freedom eliminates corruption and thereby takes people into confidence on various issues,” he added. Saying that he had underestimated the importance of transparency freedom, Sen said that people should have the right to know that all transactions are transparent.

“The state should also ensure protective freedom for its citizens by ensuring proper protection for people who were thrown to the wall by unforeseen incidents, like drought or floods, and those left jobless by policies of the state,” he said. According to Sen, the lack of protective freedom had led to a dramatic rise in mortality rates in Russia. “It is necessary to have a balanced basket to promote development as freedom and also as an end,” he said.

To this, Sen gave the example of the US “which is a successful economy but has 43 million people without any health-care. Also,Afro-Americans have a lower life expectancy, which is nothing but a failure of protective freedom”.