Nehru's vision of equality elusive: Amartya

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, NOV. 13. If on Monday he advocated intellectual clarity in challenging the ``clash of civilisations'' concept, today the Nobel laureate, Prof. Amartya Sen, said the same was needed to understand the overwhelming influence of class barriers over other forms of social disadvantages.

Delivering the 33rd Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture on `Class in India' here on the eve of the 112th birth anniversary of the country's first Prime Minister, Prof. Sen lamented the fact that Nehru's vision of equal opportunity to all remains an elusive goal 54 years after his `Tryst with Destiny' speech.

While conceding that it was an ambitious goal, the economist said it was not an impossible one to achieve. Drawing attention to the fact that the Indian Constitution was the first in the world to provide for affirmative action, he later said: ``Clarity of ends and means is the most important ingredient of effective action''.

Beginning his lecture with a quip that he had just been told ``it was no longer polite to talk about class in India'', Prof. Sen said there can be no denying the fact that class disadvantages can magnify other kinds of inequalities.

Thus having prepared the ground for his argument, the economist - who is the eighth Nobel laureate to deliver this lecture - sought to show how some of the efforts and mechanisms created to protect the disadvantaged classes had become barriers to their empowerment. To elucidate his argument, he cited India's food policy and the state of elementary education.

On the food policy front, Prof. Sen commented on the contradiction in the fact that India provided proof of the worst kind of under-nourishment in the world while boasting of enormous buffer stocks that are mounting by the day.

As for elementary education, the economist said with there being a marked improvement in the pay packets of teachers - a cause he admitted to have supported in his youth - the divide between them and the disadvantaged classes had widened and teacher absenteeism was seen to be higher in schools with a sizable presence of Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe children.

Such being the ground reality, Prof. Sen was of the view that public policy should be open to scrutiny and reviewed regularly so that the vision of Jawaharlal Nehru does not remain an impossible dream.

The second of his three-lecture tour in Delhi saw a houseful turnout with the gathering being marked by the presence of two former Prime Ministers, Mr. P.V. Narasimha Rao, and Mr. I.K. Gujral; the Congress(I) president, Ms. Sonia Gandhi; the former Finance Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh; and the poet, Mr. Javed Akhtar, with whom the Nobel laureate had shared the stage on Monday evening.

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