Indian Development Selected Regional Perspectives

India is a country of extreme economic and social diversity, and the performances of Indian states in eliminating basic deprivations are remarkably disparate. This book, a companion volume to Dreze's and Sen's India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (OUP 1996), draws lessons from this diversity through three case studies (of Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, and Kerala) and two national overviews that look at socio-economic policy and demographic indicators.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. India is a country of great diversity. The commonly used indicators of `quality of life' (such as life expectancy, infant mortality, and literacy) vary tremendously between the different states, rivalling international contrasts between very low performing countries and very high achieving ones. This volume of essays reflects an attempt to draw lessons from the disparate experiences within India, rather than from contrasts with the experiences of other countries. It supplements Drèze and Sen's India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity, which studies what we can learn from international comparisons of policies, actions, and achievements. The essays challenge exclusively economic judgements of the development process. The first task is to identify the ends of economic and social development in order to have a basis in which to found the means and strategies. The second task is to understand a wider range of means than those related simply to the use or non-use of markets.The first two overview essays study the issues at the national level, focusing on policy debates and district-by-district demographic indicators, respectively. They are followed by detailed case studies of three very different states: Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, and West Bengal.

Preface; Amartya Sen: Radical Needs and Moderate Reforms; Mamta Murthi, Anne-Catherine Guio, and Jean Dr`eze: Mortality, Fertility, and Gender Bias in India; Jean Dr`eze and Haris Gazdar: Uttar Pradesh: The Burden of Inertia; Sunil Sengupta and Haris Gazdar: Agrarian Politics and Rural Development in West Bengal; V. K. Ramachandran: Kerala's Development Achievements

Sen is Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. He is a former Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford University, and a former Delegate to the Press. He is President of the American Economic Association, and a past president of both the Econometric Society and the International Economic Association. In 1990 he was awarded the Giovanni Agnelli Prize for the promotion of the understanding of ethical issues in modern society.