The Hindu : 'Economic growth a human right'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Aug 04, 2003

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'Economic growth a human right'

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI AUG. 3. A two-day workshop on the `Right to Development' here discussed different ways to define the development as a human right and the means of enforcing and implementing it.

Arjun Sengupta, expert on the Right to Development to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, was of the view that economic growth was a human right as it was a means to deliver the rights to education, health and food.

Prof. Sengupta saw the fulfilment of the right to development through an international compact - the `development compact'. In this compact, the developing countries would adopt a rights-based approach to development, within the framework of the 1986 U.N. resolution on the Right to Development, and developed donor countries would provide the resources to towards this end.

Commenting on Prof. Sengupta's paper, economist and the Nobel Laureate, Amartya Sen, said that it was a conceptual and political mistake to look at growth as a human right. Applying a radical concept like human rights to the economic growth ``gave comfort to reactionary arguments'' he said. Prof. Sen's intervention set the parameters of discussion on the first day.

Ravi Srivastava of Jawaharlal Nehru University said that putting growth at the centre of the discussion, as an enabler of other rights was a problem. The chairman of the Agricultural Prices Commission, Abhijit Sen, was critical of the idea of the `development compact'. The purpose of the Right to Development was ``only in part to include human rights considerations into the notion of development'', he said. ``Its bigger purpose is to attract money from donor countries.'' Prof. Sen said the right to development was based on the notion of sovereignty and appealing to the international community was a ``double edged sword''.

Pulin Nayak of the Delhi School of Economics said he too did not share the independent expert's enthusiasm for the `development compact'. Major donor countries, including the United States, had failed even to meet the current agreed obligation of a nominal 0.7 percent of the gross domestic product because of ``domestic political constraints''. It was unreasonably idealistic to expect them to respond differently in the future.

Reorganisation of priorities

Prof. Nayak said that a country, which was concerned about basic rights, did not need cooperation from international agencies. A suitable reorganisation of the priorities, such as reducing the defence expenditure was sufficient.

At the workshop, dominated by economists, political scientist Jos Mooij of the Centre for Economic and Social Studies, Hyderabad, offered a wider perspective. She said the selection of education, health and food as the basic rights in the right to development framework fitted too neatly into the neo-liberal reform agenda. Inclusion of issues such as the right to work and the right to property would make a discussion on development as a human right more meaningful.

Prof. Mooij also raised the question of `equality' — central to any understanding of human rights — and asked whether it was an alien concept to India. Normative systems of discrimination, like caste, which said that people were not equal functioned to withhold rights.

Much of the discussion focused on whether and how the right to development could be implemented. Prof. Mooij pointed out that there was a narrowness of approach that appeared to focus on financial allocations.

Picking up this thread, Jean Dreze of the Delhi School of Economics said that if the issue of rights was to be taken seriously there had to be a vision, a willingness to look beyond the present.

It was an acceptance of the present system that made all those discussing the issue of rights at the conference `factor in constraints, like the lack or resources, when talking about the enforceability of rights.

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