Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen is arguably India's pre-eminent intellectual, and has long been in high demand throughout the world as a graduation speaker, conference participant and interviewee. He earned his name by promulgating economic theories with a pro-poor bent. In fact, it was his argument that development cannot be measured by growth in per-capita income alone that finally compelled the World Bank to formally adopt the Human Development Index, which takes into account a wide variety of quality-of-life factors in determining a country's overall welfare. Sen was also the first to proffer that malnutrition among Indian girls was a form of systematic discrimination, and also that famines are not a result of overall food shortage so much as resulting from declines in incomes. Without his theorising, public thought would still conclude that poverty in India is caused merely by its large population.
Sen's liberal, humanistic contributions to economics, a field many see as congenitally conservative, have been so widely discussed, and appreciated, that his recent pronouncements about the political economy of land acquisition for industrialisation in India have come as a rude surprise to many. In an interview in The Telegraph in late July, against the backdrop of the uprisings in Singur and Nandigram, Sen posited that the state had the right to seize the land of farmers and hand it over to corporations. "When people move out of agriculture, total production does not go down. So per-capita income increases," he explained. "For the prosperity of industry, agriculture and the economy, you do need industrialisation. Those in effect preventing that … do not serve the interest of the poor well."
Besides the fact that a reputed socialist, one who has repeatedly ridiculed the theory of trickle-down economics, suddenly appeared to be an apologist for rich industrialists, there was a certain disingenuousness in Sen's remarks. India's (measured) per-capita income has indeed increased over the last 60 years, and millions of Adivasis and Dalits have indeed been displaced from agriculture. But, as activists such as Medha Patkar and Arundhati Roy have ably documented, the interests of these same rural displaced have hardly been well served; in fact, their standard of living has declined. Sen also failed to highlight the fact that government subsidies are often behind industrialist successes.
Sen is equally naïve in thinking that if industrialisation does indeed cause government revenues to soar, that this money will inevitably be allocated towards services for the poor. He sanguinely declares that the market economy "creates jobs and if income goes up, government revenues go up, so there is money available for education and healthcare and other things." But who is to say that those "other things" will not be primarily the ballooning of military budgets, for instance? Health and education in India have not received short shrift over the past half-century due merely to a lack of funds.