The article intends to analyse the current situation of poverty in India and how Amartya Sen’s capability approach can offer a conceptual framework that can help overcome these problems.
Special efforts are also made to emphasise the pressing need for strong, effective and timely interventions by the government to achieve the mission of poverty alleviation in our country when understood through the lens of the capability approach.
It is often correctly argued that the capability approach is capable of reflecting the multiple ways in which human lives are blighted. Thus, it extends a promising framework for analysing poverty.
India is one of the world’s most populated democracies, with an increasing population of over 1.2 billion people. With such a huge population in place, India faces serious problems of poverty.
Despite the rapid economic growth the country has faced over the past three decades, poverty has consistently been persistent, widespread and extreme. It has paved the way for several issues like the alarming levels of hunger, high rate of unemployment, high levels of child labour and other such poverty indicators.
Since almost one-third of the population of our country is living below the national poverty line, the situation has become even more critical and needs urgent attention. Therefore, it is high time that we identify the causes of this extensive social problem and figure out mechanisms that would facilitate its alleviation.
One of the most prevalent approaches that have conceptually contributed to analysing poverty in a nation is the capability approach. This approach is not a distinct field of study in itself but rather is a lens through which we can view our existing concerns—here, the issues of poverty.
The approach in this report has been used as an aid to vouch for the cardinality of government interventions in poverty reduction and how such effective public policies will have a significant impact on lowering the poverty indicators suggested by Sen.
What Is The Capability Approach?
The capability approach developed by Amartya Sen has evolved to be an alternative model of progress and development. The approach largely focuses on people and their capabilities (end results) rather than the goods and resources (inputs).
It also gives scope for an alternative perspective in perceiving broader issues like poverty, inequality, social exclusion and gender bias which otherwise remain untouched by the economic perspective.
The capability approach views development as an expansion of the capabilities of people. It aims to better people’s well-being by expanding their capabilities, which is in turn related to the freedom of choices.
The approach understands and acknowledges the presence of diversities and the multi-dimensional nature of human well-being.
Through this framework, Sen aims at emphasising the importance of achieving outcomes that the people value and have reasons to value as against just accumulating commodities which interprets capabilities in terms of the functional freedoms people have.
It offers a comparatively universal grammar in analysing elements of human well-being.
Sen was in constant search of a measure that would efficiently represent the deprivation and well-being of people and then realised that neither income or command over commodities nor happiness or fulfilment of desires can be counted as a good indicator of the human well-being or lack of it.
Therefore, Sen shifted his focus to human functionings and capabilities based on which the quality of life is analysed. The difference between functionings and capabilities is the same as the one between achievements and opportunities or freedom.
Capabilities refer to a person’s real opportunities that would facilitate them to achieve functionings.
Capability Approach In The Paradigm Of Poverty
The issue of poverty, when analysed through the framework of the capability approach, can be seen as the deprivation of certain basic capabilities, which can vary from being well nourished to being sufficiently sheltered and clothed to avoiding preventable morbidity and so on and so forth.
When used to understand poverty, the capability approach often sharply criticises the primary role given to income in the measurement of poverty.
Sen argues that a person’s actual capabilities or opportunities are of very high intrinsic importance. Income is just a means to reach these capabilities and thus is both contingent and instrumental.
This brings us to the distinction between direct and indirect concepts of poverty. The former concept of poverty emphasises cases where the living standards drop below a certain level, which is attributed to the lack of resources.
On the other hand, the indirect concept focuses on cases wherein the resources fall and then the assumption is made that it is a result of the low living standards.
But the capability approach, in contrast to these assumptions, holds the view that different people have different needs and thus will require varying levels of resources to achieve the same standard of living.
The capability approach offers a counter paradigm for the utilitarian and income-based approach along with the welfare approach.
If we observe the development status of different states of India, we can clearly understand how the per capita GDP has no direct correlation with the people’s well-being.
For instance, in the case of Kerala, it has a moderately developed economy but has managed to attain a significant reduction in poverty. This was achieved due to the increased investments in the expansion of education, health care facilities and equitable land distribution by the government.
This can be contrasted with the case of Punjab, which suffers from higher levels of poverty than Kerala. Hence, the well-being of people is not directly dependent on economic growth.
Though the economy of India has opened up, offering new opportunities because of the economic reforms, the majority of the population has failed to gain the benefits because of the pressing conditions of inaccessibility to basic education, low levels of literacy and lack of proper health care facilities.
Also, for the poor households in rural developing countries like India, the accessibility to resources required to lead a meaningful life is more important than income.
Given the importance of growth, it alone cannot suffice the need of alleviating poverty. By stressing on non-income determinants of poverty, the capability approach had already shown the need for a stable and well-functioning educational system, health services for the poor and good infrastructure, all facilitated by efficient governance.
Sen had repeatedly stressed the need for special attention in the education sector as it aids in developing human resources. Failure to achieve success in the aforementioned areas could be quite disastrous in terms of poverty alleviation.
A significant part of the success is entirely dependent on the steps taken by the government to support education, infrastructure development, health services, etc.
Role Of Government Interventions In Poverty Alleviation
One of the most effective means of reducing poverty is through timely government expenditure on social sectors such as health care, education and other welfare services for the poor, widows and the elderly.
Multiple economists have repeatedly emphasised the inevitability of education and health in reducing poverty. The most prominent amongst them was Amartya Sen.
By applying the capability approach to poverty, he strongly argued that health and education were necessities that add value to human life. These two are the basis for work productivity, the capacity to grow intellectually, physically and emotionally and the capacity to learn.
Education evidently has a positive impact on the quality of life. A country with better access to quality education for all enables its citizens to lead a better quality of life with more opportunities, thus, reducing poverty.
An improved educational system, especially for girls and women, helps better not only their health conditions but also their children and family.
In 2011, when most developed and emerging economies achieved a 100% literacy rate, India was at 74%, although quite ahead of the 48.5% in 1990.
In addition to the literacy rate, another commonly used indicator to measure educational attainment is the average years of schooling. India just has 4.4 years of average schooling, which is only marginally greater than the 3 years in 1990.
This reflects very small and slow improvement in educating the population and demands sudden government interventions. Though the primary, secondary and tertiary enrollment rates have generally shown an increase, going by the international standards, the secondary and tertiary levels remain low, especially the latter.
The pupil-teacher ratio (PTR) is a significant indicator of the quality of education and it is considerably high. Thus, this highlights the requirement of government policies to lower the PTR and focus on the institutional structure of the schools to upgrade the quality of education and increase the global competitiveness of our human resources.
The children who already come from poverty-stricken families are at the disadvantage of lacking basic resources coupled with polluted and unsafe neighbourhoods, thus, depriving them of a supportive environment for learning.
Poverty can, therefore, have adverse impacts on the cognitive development of individuals. Current poverty statistics and the widening wealth disparities between the ones at the top and the bottom of the distribution are posing serious questions that undermine the spirit of democracy and curb the mobility of children of the coming generations.
Thus, in the light of these issues, the framework of capability approach bestows the responsibility on the State to facilitate education amongst the poverty-stricken individuals.