By Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar
Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar
Amartya Sen, as befits a Nobel laureate, has often produced careful calculations to throw light on dark situations, such as the number of deaths caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China. So, it was astonishing to hear him say on a recent TV programme that the delay in passing the Food Security Bill was causing 1,000 deaths per week (equal to 52,000 per year).
This was not based on any known methodology — he simply plucked the figure out of the air and threw it at the audience. This startled a fellow participant, Arvind Panagariya, who let fly in a subsequent interview. “I often say in jest that serious economists are handicapped in policy debates in India because their opponents feel entitled not only to their arguments but their own facts as well! And here I was facing the same from Sen!
“Deaths often have multiple causes. In the case of children, a partial list includes premature births, low birth weight, infections, congenital diseases, accidents, poor water quality, poor medical assistance and poor diet. I am mystified how Sen can attribute a precise number of child deaths to the absence of a policy that has not been in place for a single day, a policy that is subject to so many lapses and leakages along the implementation chain, whose impact critically depends on how the beneficiaries adjust their consumption in response to it, and which can, after all, potentially impact only calorie intake and not other causes of death.”
Sen had said a few days earlier that delays in the Food Security Bill’s passage could cause deaths, but this seemed not to attract public attention. “To capture people’s attention, you have to have a number,” Sen declared.
And so, he duly produced a number — 1,000 deaths a week — simply to catch people’s attention. Thus has a Nobel laureate become a pamphleteer, inventing figures like any populist politician.
Scathing Comment
He certainly caught the media’s attention, but not in the manner he expected. Rather, he attracted much scathing comment. For instance, a news portal said, “It is becoming increasingly difficult to retain respect for Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. He seems to surface in the media every time the UPA government is about to legislate its pet follies, providing intellectual succour to mindless spending and corruption.”
As for calculating the impact of the Bill, a columnist in a business newspaper has made an attempt. He says implementing the Bill …read more
Source: OP-EDS
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