The Hindu Business Line : Fragrance of roses from a Pakistani village for some inner peace

ON CITY roads, patriotism has been peaking this week, with one more Independence Day only a day away. Beggars at traffic signals are not asking for charity but vending the tricolour, so you can catch a bit of nationalism on the move and regurgitate some sentiment with a proxy in plastic available for a mere rupee or less.

I am sure the value you give `freedom' would have some margin built into it, so the street urchins in rags end their day with some money, perhaps wishing fondly that August 15 was some more days away, because their ware may not find takers till around Republic Day, many months away.

There is that pleading smile of an old man who says, "Jhanda, bapu," and a famished mother with a weeping infant on her shoulder, hoping somebody picks up the flag-on-a-stand for Rs 10, something that sits snug on the dashboard, so she can be saved the running between cars.

Marketers would be reassured that Brand India has not gone out of fashion but, as an accountant, I wonder how they would manage their unsold stock if they had paid for the product upfront; and what would be the percentage of wastage because I see a little girl in tatters weeping on the median because a couple of flags had fallen on the road and were run over by merciless vehicles. Ah, how I wish I could buy all their flags if only to get them smile for at least an evening.

Something more tangible than such a flight of fancy is Sabina Alkire's Valuing Freedoms, published by Oxford (www.oup.com) , and I pick it off the economics rack as a good fit to my mood. It is about Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen's capability approach and poverty reduction, and his proposition "that the objective of development should be that of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy."

The book opens in 1995, in a Pakistani village called Arabsolangi. There, a group of eight people chosen by the yardstick of poverty, "in income or calories per day or literacy or life expectancy or social exclusion", decided to cultivate roses on a leased land. They had considered other alternatives too: the idea of cultivating bananas was dropped because they were "too heavy and physically demanding for the women"; onions were too seasonal to fetch a regular income, and sunflowers did not command a good price.

"The roses grew well, and after experiments with rose-water and rose paste, the group found that rose garlands were the most lucrative". So, they got their money. But there was more. By a year and a half, Dadi Taja, a widow was "able to walk about without shame".

Alkire adds: "She also mentioned her delight that the fragrance of roses permeates her clothing, her satisfaction from working together in a group, and her inner peace because the garlands are used in saints' shrines and to decorate the Qur'an Sharif."

Poverty reduction is not achieved simply because income per capita goes up.

"The goal of both human development and poverty reduction should be to expand the capability that people have to enjoy `valuable beings and doings'," is what is the insight of capability approach, explains the author.

"They should have access to the positive resources they need in order to have these capabilities. And they should be able to make choices that matter to them."

To illustrate: "If we know that the rose cultivators could realistically choose to enjoy a greater set of valuable activities or ways of being, then we would conclude that poverty reduction had occurred."

How foolish it would be to aim at equalising "the income of an elderly farmer and a young student"! Try Amartya Sen's `space of capabilities' as an alternative, where he advises policy-makers to factor in human diversity and work for equalising "the capability each has to enjoy valuable activities and states of being."

Prof Sen's approach has four core concepts — functionings, freedom, pluralism, and incompleteness. Functionings are `beings and doings' — "the various things a person may value doing or being" — and these are constitutive of a person's being.

Thus, "the perennially deprived become reconciled with their circumstances and appreciative of small mercies." Their psychic pleasure at small improvements to their situation is disproportionate to the benefit judged from another perspective, explains the book.

Next comes `freedom'. Remember, it's intrinsic as well as instrumental. "The good life is partly a life of genuine choice, and not one in which the person is forced into a particular life — however rich it might be in other respects." That's because what's `good' depends on accomplishing `what we value'.

Isn't a wider choice always better? Doubtful, Prof Sen would say, because "increase in choices per se does not necessarily lead to an increase in freedom," as when options added are not the ones we value anyway, or what's sacrificed may be "the option to live a peaceful and unbothered life."

As with sophisticated software, "more freedom of choice can bemuse and befuddle, and make one's life more wretched."

The concept of `pluralism' would expose you to four different spaces: well-being and agency gridlocked with achievement and freedom.

The last concept is `incompleteness'. "The capability approach is deliberately incomplete," Alkire writes, to refer to what Prof Sen calls "assertive incompleteness."

So is this article too, I confess, because already my `psychic pleasure' of reading this economics book is disproportionately high, considering the number of pages I've managed to turn in the intro thus far.

Economics@TheHindu.co.in