i rarely follow amartya sen. he has a fanatical following among economists, but i did not follow him because like lot of economists, he is divorced from the reality.

how come?

look at his latest statements are reported by hindu.

i quote from the above link,
But development cannot be divorced from ecological and environmental concerns as both are inter-related. Focussing on the quality of life could help generate a necessary understanding of not only development, but also of the nature of the environment.

"development cannot be divorced from ecological and environment concerns..". mr. sen are you sleeping like rip wan winkle. india's ecology and environment has been and is being destroyed in name of providing few jobs mostly in hazardous red tag industries and suddenly mr.sen raises a feeble voice on environmental concern.

let us take an example. cuddalore is a beautiful coastal town 200 kms south of tamilnadu. there is an area called SIPCOT which has hazardous industries that make a killing in profit but seldom care about pollution. you can catch the pollution issues in sipcot blog.

now in name of providing jobs to roughly 1000 to 2000 labourers, a thriving agriculture and fishing has been destroyed by pollution. the uppanar river is a toxic hellspot polluted by sipcot industries.

how can learned people like amartya sen tell to balance jobs and environment when the industries wilfully pollute and does not even care a tiny little for environment. what amartya sen should have told is for industries to have enviornment safeguard as holy grail and not to violate enviornment rules and laws and adhere strictly to pollution norms.

but sadly amartya sen speaks like politican rather than an economist and we are looking at places like cuddalore becoming another bhopal.

like the legend anil agarwal of cseindia says below, we are sorry mr.sen. please grow up.
"Sorry to say this, Mr Sen, but I think the challenge we face is quite different than the simplistic one you have put forward. Amartya Sen made his mark by pointing out that people often die of hunger not due to a shortage of food but often because they lack ‘entitlements’. He therefore talks of welfare systems to create ‘social security safety nets’. The problem is this analysis can explore and explain ‘economic poverty’, a phenomenon Sen’s professional colleagues — namely, economists — love to study. It completely ignores what I would like to call ‘ecological poverty’. Why are economists unable to fathom it, including our ‘sensitive’ Nobel Prize winner?"