NEW DELHI, JAN 1: Nobel laureate Professor Amartya Sen today asked India to frame a long-term policy to address issues of poverty and health and make education a fundamental right for raising the living standards and overall development of the economy.He told Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha, who met him this morning, that ``there is no instant solution to these problems when there has been a history of neglect of these issues.''After an hour-long discussion with Sinha, Sen told mediapersons that he believed basic education should be made fundamental right as an overall commitment towards achieving a higher literacy rate. Sinha, for his part, said the government would take note of Professor Sen's views. ``It was our endeavour and it would continue to be our endeavour to translate Sen's ideas into practice in this country,'' Sinha said.Sinha along with senior officials of the Finance Ministry including Secretary Vijay Kelkar and economic advisor S Shankar Acharya met Sen, on his first visit to the capitalafter receiving the Nobel Prize for Economics.Later, Sen was conferred an honorary degree of the Jawaharlal Nehru University by Vice-President Krishan Kant. Kant said Sen had kindled the hopes of vast millions of poor and deprived people by ``reminding us that it is possible for a society to command a superior quality of life with a relatively slower growth of gross domestic product and per capita income.''Kant noted that Sen had shown to the deprived people, whose share in the world's resources continued to decline, to find the means to utilise their limited resources for extraordinary results.
