Articles by Amartya Sen

India's past has become an ideological battleground. The central issue in this battle is not the invoking of the past, but precisely how the past is brought into discussions about the present. Related to this basic inquiry is the subsidiary question: does the acknowledgement of the continuing relevance of the past imply that "the distant past must guide how one acts in the present"? The recognition of the relevance of the past must be distinguished from the case for being guided by the past in a choice-independent way. It is important to recognise that the significance of the past for us today involves selection and choice in which our contemporary concerns can have a reasonable role. It is also important to see that this connection between the present and our involvement with the past neither undermines the need to look for veracity and ascertained evidence nor removes the case for deliberately concentrating on those cases in which the lessons involved have particular relevance to our concerns today. The problem of selections from the past involves, in this sense, both epistemology and practical reason.

the Sex Bias Amartya Sen Sunil Sengupta This paper reports on some empirical field work done by the authors at the Agro-Economic Research Centre at Santiniketan.

February 12, 1983 of Agriculture, June 28. Raj, K N 1976; 'Growth and Stagnation in Indian Industrial Development", February.
Reddy. V N 1978: "Growth Rates'', EPW, May 13.

authority like the Swedish Ombudsman to deal with the problem. This 'Ombudsmania' from which professionals in law and public administration suffered, appears to have waned recently. This is seen in the reactions to the Report of the Joint Select Committee of Parliament on the Lokpal Bill as reflected in the news media. Or it may be because corruption has become so much a part of everyone's life that people have evolved strategies and styles of operating such a system and the insecurity of dealing with an uncorrupt administration is perhaps what makes people loath to tamper with the existing arrangements.

Amartya Sen Utilitarianism is perhaps the most commonly used framework of thought for policy making.
From the distant reaches of optimal accumulation to the more mundane exercises of benefit-cost analysis, the additive social welfare function is a common basis for thinking and action. Benefits to different individuals (or groups) are added and the sum compared for selecting optimal plans or projects in theory, and something of that rubs off in practical decision taking as well Is this indeed a good basis for systematic thinking on planning problems ?