REPLUG of my #GrowthVsEquity essay in 2013: WHERE’S GROWTH FOR JAGDISH BHAGWATI, AMARTYA SEN TO FIGHT? Is the issue obsolete? What say?!
Wednesday, 24 July 2013 | Rohit Bansal | in Business

It was amusing to see an economics professor trend on twitter this morning. The driver was Amartya Sen’s remark that he won’t like to see Narendra Modi at the helm. Embedded within was his critique of economic reforms; the message iterated in the title of his new book with Jean Dreze, “An Uncertain Glory, India and Its Contradictions.”
Sen’s carps aren’t new. Nor did they always make a splash. It is only now that smart publishers like Penguin have in place the right social-media ecosystem that sets our country’s ivory towers on fire.
I can offer three encounters with Sen as proof. It was a rainy afternoon in 1998 at the India International Centre (IIC) and the economics don wasn’t yet a Nobel laureate for economics.
As the public lecture ended, I tip toed to him and asked: “Will you come to my television studios in South Extension?” I had asked only in hope, mindful of my obscurity, and the slush beyond IIC’s picturesque surroundings.
“Yes! If only you wait while I drop these papers in my room,” the professor replied. By the time I had driven my Maruti 800 to the holding area, Sen was already there, waiting. He hopped on besides me, and went on to give a detailed interview on what India was botching up in her economics.
When I wondered why he has such piercing insights, but no track record of serving the Government (just to rag him, I cited Manmohan Singh’s record in public service), Sen said he is no Manmohan Singh; and he would never take a sarkari job!
Alas, those weren’t the days of repeated play outs. Nor would newspapers deign to quote a TV interview. The story died no sooner our programme was aired.
(Of course, three years after becoming Prime Minister, Singh overcame Sen’s self-imposed renunciation; co-opting him in a quasi-official job as chairman of the Nalanda mentor group.)
My second encounter might confirm Sen’s sway with the media. It was the winter of 2002. One Friday, out of the blue from London, I called his office at Trinity College, wondering if I could call on the good professor. Sen’s staff didn’t just give me an appointment, but a friend and I were afforded an entire day at the Master’s Lodge. Most of what he talked, you guessed it, was how “stupid” Manmohan Singh’s advisors were to be chasing growth. The chat became memorable with Sen pacing the hallowed corridors, playfully reenacting how Newton calculated the speed of sound, and then giving us the low down on India’s fallen reforms right under Newton’s Apple Tree!
I left after caressing an advance copy of his forthcoming book, “The Argumentative Indian,” discounting the odds of being carried if I bothered my newspaper with a report.
By the third encounter, in Fall 2009, Sen had returned to his economics department study at Harvard. Appointment granted, I asked him for his renewed sense of Indian reforms. What followed was the narrative on the follies of our economic czars, aspiring for double-digit growth without addressing chronic under nourishment.

So, when consumer rights group CUTS flagged the “growth vs. poverty” debate one more time in 2011, two months after Sen’s bête noire, Prof Jagdish N Bhagwati, addressed Indian Parliament, flagging that growth is the centrality which pulls up the poor into gainful employment and as a source of revenue for anti-poverty initiatives, I was surprised to see the robust “growth” vs. “equity” debate resurface one more time.
CUTS went on to document in an instructive volume the barrage of emails that were traded for several weeks.
“…only in India do serious intellectuals dream of debating these issues,” Martin Wolf, one of the world’s most influential journalists, wrote in The Financial Times. “Obviously higher incomes are a necessary condition for better state-funded welfare, better jobs and so forth. This is simply not debatable.”
Wolf was wrong. No sooner The Economist reviewed “An Uncertain Glory,” Bhagwati responded one more time. Sen was provoked enough to accuse Bhagwati of “unilateral attacks.” The Columbia professor, in a bylined piece in The Mint, has now said: “Sen is not simply wrong; he also poses a serious danger to economic policy in India.” Both titans sure know how to beat a dead horse. But can someone show me the growth?
(The columnist is CEO & Co-Founder, India Strategy Group, Hammurabi & Solomon Consulting. Tweets @therohitbansal)
Weblink: http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnists/business/wheres-growth--for-bhagwati--sen-to-fight.html
PS: A happy chat with Professor Bhagwati and Prof Padma Desai two years later:

