The well-established contribution of late Lakshminarayan Sinha is his widely recognized views on the Economics of Welfare. To him the failures of positive economics are held responsible for the evolution of welfare economics …………….. "The pioneers of both classical and neo-classical schools had faith in the laws of economics they discovered and believed to be inexorable. They had no need, therefore, to denote themselves to what came later to be welfare economics. If positive economics has the adequacy long searched for, welfare economics is redundant. Further more, distribution of income is an issue which has baffled analytical efforts of many great economists. It has two aspects: functional and personal. The first is conserved with distribution of output into wage and profit. The second in concerned with inequality of income (wage and profit together) is accruing to individuals. The first, the issue of functional distribution, awaited discovery the true law of economics about it. The second, the issue of personal distribution, is largely a matter of social arrangement or social structure as Keynes called it. Much depends on whether means of production are under private of public ownership, whether these are concentrated in a few private ownership, or whether these are under the control of bureaucracy, or collectives, craft guilds or workers’ syndicates in case of public ownership. Apart from these social and political arrangements there is a little economics about it. If there are inequalities in distribution of wealth and income initially, these are bound to increase in course of economic operations. If the initial inequalities in ownership of capital are to be merely retained and not to be allowed to grow, fiscal measures are called for to eliminate increase in inequalities. With increased use of statistics it is possible to measure the increases and employ efficient fiscal tools to wipe these out (Value &Growth, 1974,P.190)".

The practical approach of Welfare economics was on the front page of international news in 1998 owing to the fact that the Nobel Prize was given to the Indian economist, Prof. Amartya Sen, on the basis of his study related to the down side of economic subjects of poverty, inequality, unemployment, hunger and famine which were within a broad context of social choice and welfare economics.

Amartya Sen’s contribution to welfare economics, the basic theory of how societies make choices that are both fair and efficient, have become part of every graduate student’s training in economic theory. His criques of economic concepts that were once take for granted are among the most quoted in economics, including his essay ‘Rational Fools’ in which he takes on the classical presumption that people are motivated primarily by self-interest. However, Amartya Sen is best known for his work on the causes of famine, on inequality and on the measurement of poverty-work that may believe has saved a large numbers of lives.

Amartya Sen’s 1981 book Poverty and Famine (Oxford University Press) influenced the way international organizations and governments deal with food crises. He showed the famine was not just a consequence of nature, but an avoidable economic and political catastrophe. Drought and flood often precede starvation, but declines in food production rarely account for it. Typically, even if many thousands of people die, there is enough food in the country to go around or enough money to import it.

Disaster strikes, Sen found, when the poorest people can no longer afford to buy food because they lose their jobs or because food prices soar. In the great Bengal famine in which three million people perished, India’s food supplies were not unusually low. Clolnial rulers, immune to democratic pressures, simply stood by partly because of Amartya Sen’s finding, governments now focus less on direct distribution of food and more on replacing the lost income of the poor, through, for example, public works projects. (New York Times, Oct. 20,1998).

I have made a simple comparison between economic ideas of Amartya Sen and Lakshminarayan on welfare economics which was published in Hindi Aaj Daily on April 19,1999 and came to conclusion that several points of similarity were found in their approaches.

At the advent of 1970 while Prof. Sinha was concentrated to write his famous book entitled ‘Value and Growth’ in which his views on welfare economics was one of the main chapter, he made a clarification on it in our classes, like Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, and opined, the subject matters or scope of welfare economics are not limited only to the theoretical aspects of welfare economics as said by the earlier economists like Parero, Hicks, Kaldor and Scitovsky but the social welfare activities done in the society like education, health, postal , public distribution , defence and transport and communications are directly related to maximization of social welfare too. According to Sinha "….. external economies, another issue in welfare economics, belong largely to activities of the Government. Road, railways, postal arrangements, foreign policy, difence, education, health services provided by the Government have significant external economic effects for operating units, private and public in manufacture, agriculture and trade (Value and Growth, P.191)". He suggests that the Government should be sensitive on this external issue of welfare economics.

He emphasizes that distribution of income is one of the determinants of social welfare. The Government to increase the extent of maximum social advantage of the people in the country out of revenue received from the imposition of taxation on the people. If the Government is efficient and effective, the maximization in welfare of masses would be greater otherwise vice-versa. Food crisis in a country occurs due to inefficient Government and people have to face the tragedy of famine on account of failure of Government’s machineries. By giving a citation of East-Pakistan Prof. Sinha makes it clear that the inefficient, weak and corrupt military rulers were responsible for wide spread starvation, poverty, famine and food crisis of the people there in 1970. The real causes of these problems were not economic-the shortage of food-stuffs-but political-negligence of the duty of the Government. For the solution of these problems he has suggested in his famous said book that "Given qualities of labours and capital, social welfare is maximum when the resources are put to their optimum use. If capital is not sufficient to absorb all labour, optimum use of capital alone is the issue in the short run. In such a state optimum use of labour is a problem of dynamic welfare economics. If capital has capacity to absorb all labour, the maximum consists of full capacity use and full employment. The issue of static welfare economics is, their establishment and maintenance of the optimum equilibrium state, given the economic structure. The solution has come easily in our system by the application of this equation (Ibid, 193). In this way, he claims to find out the solution of the problem of welfare economics. These views were expressed by him during the sixties earlier than Sen.

On the other hand, when we make a comparison of welfare economic ideas of the Nobel Laureate, Dr. Sen, with Prof. Lakshminarayan we find that both are almost same with minor deviations and improvements. The basic tenets of Narayan’s ideas are vividly seen in the body of work that Sen has produced in this field. For instance the clarification of the Royal Swedish Academy on Amartya Sen’s contribution to welfare economics is a detailed and remarkable document. Its chief merit is that it encompasses within its purview the sweep of Sen’s extensive contributions to academic economics in the fields of specialization of social choice, welfare distribution and poverty. It presents independently his work on individual values and collective decisions on the guiding forces of welfare and poverty of the poorest particularly related to three alarming economic problems of the society, i.e., famine, hunger and poverty. A general study of the words of Sen-collective choice and Social Welfare (1970), On Economic Inequality (1973) and Poverty and Famine (1981) – make it obvious that social welfare can be maximized, to him, by increasing economic capabilities of the people with the cooperation of Government. He is of the view that inadequate basic education, blemish health services, mismanagement of Government machinery, negligence of social justice are the main obstacles to the field of maximization of social welfare. In the context of explanation of famine his philosophy is similar to Prof. Narayan in which he asserts that the main cause of famine is not the shortage of food-grains but the weak controlling power of a government and faulty public distribution system. Generally it is observed that heavy quantity of food stuffs is resorted to export from the famine-prone areas of a country.

In this way, to my mind, on a comparative footing Prof. Sen is influenced by Prof. Sinha and he is close to him especially in the field of welfare economics. But the basic difference between the two is that these views of Sinha are mere an axiom and, better to say, only an approach on the subject but on the other hand, the thoughts of Sen on Welfare economics are a collection of comprehensive scientific philosophy. In other word, while the contribution of the former is a foundation stone of the edifice of welfare economics on which the latter has constructed a strong and attractive garret of these ideas which caused to victory on the Royal Swedish Academy. A simile can make it more evident that Prof. Edgeworth started making of a raw and designless algebraic dress for the body of economic science while late Prof. J.R. Hicks made it more designfull, accurate and cohesive. The credit goes to him for its scientific use and application of mathematical tool in the explanation of economic theories of this social science. So is the difference between Sinha and Sen to me.

BACK