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IITs should address illiteracy and poverty: Amartya Sen

Shyam Ranganathan

Growth in India being maintained at high levels over the last few years does not directly benefit the poor, says Nobel laureate

Issue of basic malnutrition yet to be addressed
Focus on pragmatic “nyaya” framework

Photo : Bijoy Ghosh

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen at the valedictory session of Pan IIT 2008 in Chennai on Sunday. —

CHENNAI: The Indian Institutes of Technology have provided expertise in technical and corporate leadership in India, but for the IIT system to be really influential, they have to address the more basic issues of illiteracy, poverty and malnourishment, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen said here on Sunday.

Delivering the concluding remarks at Pan IIT 2008 being held at IIT-Madras, Dr. Sen said that though Nehru’s vision had helped in the creation of the IITs as one of the globally recognised institutions, he had not addressed the issue of elementary education sufficiently. This had resulted in glaring illiteracy levels and a system plagued by teacher absenteeism while, at the same time, India was moving ahead into positions of leadership in manufacturing, Information Technology and other sectors.

Growth in India being maintained at high levels over the last few years did not directly benefit the poor. Only a part of the wealth actually flowed back to them, and this too mainly because of increased revenue collection. Even the current global slowdown would also cause only an indirect problem to the poor due to reduced State spending on many essential services.

Glaring inequalities

There were also glaring inequalities in the coverage provided to events affecting the rich and the coverage to the more chronic and continuous problems faced by the poor, and this had to be addressed to reduce poverty, Dr. Sen said.

Healthcare was another major issue, Dr. Sen said, noting that while famines could be eliminated in functioning democracies with the active participation of a free press, strong opposition parties etc., basic malnutrition had yet to be addressed.

The fact that there were more malnourished children in South Asia than those in Africa was an illustration of a big failure on the part of the system which had produced other successes.

Dr. Sen thematically addressed all issues with an illustration of classical Indian legal literature. “Nyaya” and “Neeti” were usually both translated as “justice.” But “nyaya” represented justice through realisation based on actual outcomes, “neeti” was based on the application of existing rules of behaviour. This dichotomy was echoed in the system-driven justice notions of Hobbes and Kant on the one hand, and outcome-driven notions of Condorcet and Rawls on the other.

Many projects in India were not able to attain their objectives due to focus on the “neeti” type of argument, with the phrase “I did my best [within the rules]” sufficing to explain away failure. What was required to eliminate the inequities in the Indian system was to focus on working towards achieving specific goals within the pragmatic “nyaya” framework, and this was within the capabilities of the IIT system, Dr. Sen said.

Reservation

Even the issue of merit getting diluted through reservation had to be looked at carefully. While it was very possible that a person benefiting out of reservation might not perform as well as a person selected purely for merit, one had to look beyond just the “bend in the river” to see the “shape of the river” and see the larger benefit to society over a longer period of time.

While the “neeti” argument would only provide a simplistic answer to this problem, the “nyaya” argument would look at the problem from a long-term perspective.

Addressing questions from the audience, Dr. Sen said he was not in the least worried about India’s becoming a superpower and was more concerned about the creation of an India with happy people having access to all the basic entitlements.

To this end, IITs could contribute by infusing their culture of engineering focussed on solving particular problems, he said.

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