Human Development and Transcendent Humanism in Amartya Sen

Abstract

ur world is both spectacularly rich and distressingly impoverished. As the saying goes, 'A rising tide may not lift up all the boats'. Sometimes, a quick tide, especially accompanied by a storm, dashes weaker boats to the shore, smashes them to the smithereens. In our globalized world, the market becomes the all-encompassing subject, where the poor and the marginalized face extreme injustice and objectification. In this context, the contributions of Amartya Kumar Sen, the first Indian and the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Economics (1998), are widely notable. The Development Index of a nation, according to him, is not simply on the Gross National Product (GDP) or per capita income alone, but it is to be judged on the basis of how a nation has progressed in sectors like life- expectancy, primary education, land-reform, the literacy of women and their wellbeing, healthcare, etc. In the history of political economy, Sen is the first to de-link famines from food availability and to frame the problem of famine and hunger as a political issue. 1 A democracy with multiparty election and critical media has better prospects to prevent or overcome disasters like famines simply because democratic mechanisms, which Sen considers the model form of governance, offer the space for public outcry, empowering the public to criticize and demand immediate action from the government.