The Hindu : Front Page : Education, healthcare need greater government investment: Amartya Sen

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Feb 14, 2007
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Education, healthcare need greater government investment: Amartya Sen

Staff Reporter

Amartya Sen

KOLKATA: Mere expansion of the Indian economy will not address the issues relating to the plight of the Indian child who continues to suffer from under-nourishment, anaemia and lack of basic schooling facilities, Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen said here on Tuesday.

"Income is not negligible but it is only a small contributor to the overall quality of life," Dr. Sen said, as part of a public lecture on `The Predicament of the Indian Child', organised by UNICEF, India and Pratichi (India) Trust.

The solution to the problem, according to Dr. Sen, lay not in radical alternatives but in the classical method of a greater amount of government investment in both education and healthcare, an end to the negligent attitude towards women and a more collaborative engagement with the various unions. "It is important to see what the government is doing with the extra money that is coming into its coffers," Dr. Sen said.

He cited the example of pre-1979 China, Japan, the U.S. as well as various European countries where public expenditure on education and healthcare had preceded the introduction of reforms aimed at economic expansion.

— PHOTO: PTI

VOICE FOR VOICELESS: Nobel laureate Amartya Sen with actor and social activist Shabana Azmi coming to attend a lecture organised by the Pratichi Trust and UNICEF in Kolkata on Tuesday.

"The traditional alternative has never been seriously tried in India," Dr. Sen said. The Government of India had not been able to guarantee the right to education as in many parts of the country, there were no functioning schools to attend, he added.

Similarly, the negligent attitude towards women because of the inherent gender bias in society led to undernourished mothers, distressed foetuses and underweight babies. He pointed out that the progress rate has not been very remarkable with under-nourishment dropping from 47 to 46 per cent between 1998-99 and 2005-06 and immunisation coming down from 58 to 56 per cent over the same period.

The plight of children in India across the socio-economic strata was succinctly summed up by West Bengal Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi who narrated his experiences of coming across girl students far ahead of their class, a young girl who knew the Preamble to the Constitution and seriously overweight kids in an air-conditioned school built on agricultural land.

Shabana Azmi, actress and social activist, Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader and member of the party's Polit Bureau, Sitaram Yechury, and Mira Chatterjee of the Self Employed Women's Association also spoke on the occasion.

While Ms. Azmi spoke out against the silence and tolerance that makes us condone the violation of children's rights and also guilty of complicity, Mr. Yechury spoke of the need to shift the focus from bolstering up corporate profits to people's welfare.

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