Author: Sen, Amartya
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‘Clearer? Do you mean more precise, dear goddess?’ I asked. ‘No,’ said GMT, ‘you are making the common mistake of assuming that a clear statement needs to invoke precise magnitudes. A good statement of an inherently imprecise concern – and most important concerns in the world are imprecise – must capture that imprecision, and not replace it by a precise statement about something else. You should learn to speak in an articulate way about ideas that are inescapably imprecise (as a man called Aristotle explained more than two millennia ago). And that is one of the reasons why the humanities are important. A novel can point to a truth without pretending to capture it exactly in some imagined numbers and formulae.
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They are right to grumble about the way subsidies waste economic resources, but largely fail to denounce the subsidies for the better off, in the way subsidies for the unemployed and the hungry are savaged in the press.
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So the much criticized food subsidy and employment guarantee for the poor and the unemployed cost about 1.14 per cent of GDP, whereas the cost of subsidizing electricity, fuel and fertilizers for the relatively better off is minimally 2.63 per cent, more than twice what is allocated to feed the poor and provide employment to the unemployed.’
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In fact, since the government spends only a miserable 1.2 per cent of the GDP on health care (unlike in China where the percentage is nearer 3 per cent), the total government expenditure on health for the country (in all different forms), food subsidies and employment subsidy is much less than what the government spends on subsidizing the consumption of power, diesel, cooking gas, fertilizers, etc., for relatively rich – and much more vocal – people.