by Amartya Sen
Elementary Education
For my second example, I turn to primary education in India. It suffers, of course, from many deficiencies.8 The paucity of financial resources is obviously a principal problem: there are not enough schools and the facilities available in the ones that exist are often very limited. But there are several other problems as well. A major difficulty lies in the weak institutional structure of primary schools in much of India, which are often inefficiently run. A further problem concerns inequity of schooling arrangements, and the challenge of bringing first-generation school attenders into a sympathetic and just system of primary education.9
I have had the opportunity of getting a sample of the problems involved through a small study conducted on this subject by the Pratichi Trust, which I was privileged to set up in 1999 with the help of the proceeds of my Nobel award.* We investigated the working of a number of elementary schools from three districts in West Bengal initially (but later the study was extended to six districts in West Bengal and one from the neighbouring state of Jharkhand). The overall picture that emerges from these investigations is very depressing. A significant proportion of teachers were absent from school on the days we visited them unannounced. Teacher absenteeism was very much greater in schools where the bulk of the pupils come from Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe families; indeed, 75 per cent of those schools in our list had serious problems of teacher absenteeism – much higher than in schools in which the pupils come from less disadvantaged families. A very large proportion of the children rely on private tuition as a supplement to what they get from the schools, and those who do not are evidently prevented from doing so because of penury, rather than because of being satisfied with the teaching the children get in the school. Indeed, of the pupils in Classes 3 and 4 we could test, the vast majority of those who did not get private tuition could not even sign their names.
Effective elementary education has in practice ceased to be free in substantial parts of the country, which of course is a violation of a basic right. All this seems to be reinforced by a sharp class division between teachers and the poorer families. Yet the teachers’ unions – related to the respective parties – sometimes vie with each other in championing the immunity of teachers from discipline. The parents from disadvantaged families have little voice in the running of schools, and the official inspectors seem too scared to discipline the delinquent teachers, especially when the parents come from the bottom layer of society. The teachers’ unions have, of course, had quite a positive role in the past in defending the interests of teachers, when they used to be paid very little and were thoroughly exploited. The teachers’ unions then served as an important part of the institutional support in favour of more justice. Now, however, these institutions of justice seem to work largely against justice through their inaction – or worse – when faced with teacher absenteeism and other irresponsibilities.
The problem is, in some ways, compounded by the fact that school teachers are now comparatively well paid – no longer the recipients of miserably exploitative wages. The recent boost in the salary of public servants in India (leaving far behind those who are served by the public servants, such as agricultural and industrial labourers) has led to a very substantial rise in the remuneration of school teachers (as public servants), all over India. The primary school teachers in West Bengal, where our study was conducted, now tend to get between Rs. 5,000 and 10,000 per month, in the form of salary and allowances, which compares with the total salary of teachers in the alternative schools – called Sishu Siksha Kendras – of Rs. 1,000 per month.
The salary of teachers in regular schools has gone up dramatically over recent years, even in real terms, that is, after correcting for price changes. This is an obvious cause for celebration at one level (indeed, I remember being personally involved, as a student at Presidency College fifty years ago, in agitations to raise the desperately low prevailing salaries of school teachers). But the situation is now very different. The big salary increases in recent years have not only made school education vastly more expensive (making it much harder to offer regular school education to those who are still excluded from it), but have also tended to draw the school teachers as a group further away from the families of children, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. There is considerable evidence that the class barrier that deeply impairs the delivery of school education to the worst-off members of society is now further reinforced by the increase in economic and social distance between the teachers and the poorer (and less privileged) children.
A Concluding Remark
Nehru’s hope of overcoming class divisions in the economic, social and political progress of the country remains largely unfulfilled. The barriers to progress come not only from old dividing lines, but also from new ones. Sometimes the very institutions that were created to overcome disparities and barriers have tended to act as reactionary influences in reinforcing inequity. There are many examples of such ‘friendly fire’, of which I have discussed two particular cases.
The terrible combination that we have in India of immense food mountains on the one hand and the largest conglomeration of undernourished population in the world on the other is one example of this. The positive hopes of equity through high support prices of food and payment of subsidies have, to a considerable extent, tended to produce exactly the opposite effect. Another example relates to the institutional features of delivery of primary education. The teachers’ unions, which have a very positive role to play in protecting the interests of teachers and have played that part well in the past, are often turning into an influence that reinforces the neglect of the interests of children from desperately underprivileged families. There is evidence of a hardening of class barriers that separate the newly affluent teachers from the impoverished rural poor.
I do not want to end on a note of pessimism. The point of diagnosing a problem is to use it to remedy the identified deficiencies. In the two cases considered, possible lines of reform are not hard to see. On the latter, the report of the Pratichi Trust makes a number of policy suggestions, which include emphasizing the need to strengthen the voice of parents, especially of those from the underprivileged sections, in school management. This would require a restructuring of the administration of primary education, though making room for effective parent–teacher committees for individual schools, with legal authority. With the help of the countervailing power of the interest group most directly involved – that is, parents – the role of teachers’ unions can be made more constructive. Similarly, on the former problem, the food mountains can be turned into assets rather than liabilities, with an appropriate focus on the interests of the worst-off members of the society (for example through use in school meals).*
These and other policy changes call for urgent action and consideration. That process can be facilitated by clear analysis of the exact effects of actual and possible public policies. It is important to prevent ‘friendly fire’ as well as to press for policies that can make a real difference to the inequalities of class division in India. It is crucial to scrutinize the benefits to be obtained and the losses to be sustained by the different classes and occupation groups, resulting from each policy proposal. The ubiquitous role of class divisions influences social arrangements in remarkably diverse ways and deserves a fuller recognition than it has tended to get in the making of Indian public policy. There is something serious to argue about here.
11
Women and Men*
Many Faces of Gender Inequality
Inequality between women and men can appear in many different forms – it has many faces.1 Gender disparity is, in fact, not one affliction but a multitude of problems. Sometimes the different asymmetries are quite unrelated to each other. Indeed, there may be no significant inequality in one sphere but a great deal of inequality in another. For example, Japan has no particular gender bias in nutrition or health care or school education, but men do seem to have considerable relative advantag
e in securing high leadership positions in administration or business.
However, in other cases, gender inequality of one type tends to encourage and sustain gender inequality of other kinds. Consequential analysis can then be critically important even within the large corpus of gender relations in general, in order to examine and scrutinize how the different aspects of gender inequality relate to each other. For while gender inequality has many faces, these are not independent (like those in the austere image of Brahma in early Indian iconography). Rather, they speak to each other and sometimes strongly encourage one another. For example, when women lack decisional power within the family, which amounts to a deprivation of women’s effective agency, this can also adversely affect their own well-being. The two kinds of deprivation may not only move together – be ‘covariant’ – but they may be linked with each other through causal connections.
Well-being and Agency
It is useful to relate the topic of this essay to the general distinction between two features of human life, to wit, ‘well-being’ and ‘agency’, which I have explored elsewhere.2 This distinction corresponds to the old dichotomy, much used in medieval European literature, between ‘the patient’ and ‘the agent’. The distinction is not only important in itself, it also has a very substantial bearing on the causal connections related to gender relations.*
The agency aspect refers to the pursuit of goals and objectives that a person has reason to value and advance, whether or not they are connected with the person’s own well-being. People may actively choose to pursue other objectives (that is, other than personal well-being), which could, quite possibly, be very broad, such as independence of one’s country, the elimination of famines and epidemics, or (related to the present context) the removal of gender inequality in general. Even though there may be some overlap between different objectives, nevertheless as a general rule in championing these broader ends people may not be primarily influenced by the extent to which these general objectives affect their own quality of life or welfare.
The distinction between ‘agency’ and ‘well-being’ is conceptually rich, since they refer to two distinct ways in which a person’s values, ends, ambitions, freedoms and achievements can be understood, using two different perspectives of assessment. As it happens, the distinction is of substantial relevance, in general, in interpreting practical policies and activities, and, in particular, in understanding the priorities of social movements, including the increasingly powerful ‘women’s movements’ in many parts of the world.
Indeed, until recently the activities of these movements were typically aimed, at least to a great extent, at working towards achieving better treatment for women, in particular a more ‘square deal’. This involved a focus on women’s well-being in particular. The choice of this focus has, of course, an obvious rationale, given the way women’s interests and well-being have been neglected in the past and continue to be neglected even today. But in the course of the evolution of women’s movements, their objectives have gradually broadened from this narrowly ‘welfarist’ focus towards incorporating and emphasizing the active role of women as agents in doing things, assessing priorities, scrutinizing values, formulating policies and carrying out programmes.
Women are, in this broadened perspective, not passive recipients of welfare-enhancing help brought about by society, but are active promoters and facilitators of social transformations. Such transformations influence, of course, the lives and well-being of women, but also those of men and all children – boys as well as girls. This is a momentous enrichment of the reach of women’s movements.
Interconnections and Reach
As far as women’s own well-being is concerned, it is also important to take note of the extensive interconnections between the agency aspect and the well-being aspect of women’s lives. It is obvious that the active agency of women cannot ignore the urgency of rectifying many social influences that blight the well-being of women and subject them to deprivations of various kinds. Thus the agency role must be deeply concerned inter alia with women’s well-being as well. Similarly, to consider the link from the other direction, it is not only the case that a woman whose agency is severely restricted will – for that reason and to that extent – be handicapped in well-being as well, but also, any practical attempt at enhancing the well-being of women cannot ignore the agency of women themselves in bringing about such a change. So the well-being aspect and the agency aspect of women’s movements inevitably have substantial interconnections.
Despite these connections, however, agency and well-being are two quite different perspectives, since the role of a person as an ‘agent’ is fundamentally different from the role of the same person as a ‘patient’. It is, of course, true that agents may have to see themselves, at least to some extent, as patients as well. For example, the old admonition, ‘physician, heal thyself’, is an invitation to the physician to be both an agent and a patient. But this does not alter the additional modalities and responsibilities that are inescapably associated with the agency of a person. An agent has an active role in pursuing valuable goals, and while these goals would typically include, among other objects, the person’s own well-being, they can be, at the same time, far more spacious and extensive in their coverage. The agency role can, thus, be much broader than the promotion of self welfare.
The changing focus of women’s movements towards the agency aspect is, thus, a crucial broadening of the scope and reach of these movements, and involves substantial additions to older concerns (without denying the continuing relevance of those concerns). The earlier concentration on the well-being of women, or to be more exact, on the ‘ill-being’ of women and the deprivations that yield that ill-being, was not, of course, silly or mistaken. Deprivations in the well-being of women were certainly serious – sometimes atrocious – and their removal is clearly important for social justice. There are excellent reasons for bringing these deprivations of women’s well-being to light, and to fight for the removal of these iniquities. But nevertheless, conceptualizing women’s deprivation basically in terms of well-being, and thus concentrating on the ‘patient’ aspect of women, cannot but miss out something extraordinarily important about women as active agents of change, which can transform their own lives and the lives of other women, and indeed the lives of everyone in society – women, men and children. Women’s movements as well as the growing volume of feminist literature have both been involved, in recent decades, in this broadening of focus. As a consequence, the new agenda has tended to transcend the view of women as patient solicitors of social equity, and see women as harbingers of major social change, in making the world a more liveable place for all. The focus on voice in this book fits well particularly with the agency aspect of gender relations.
Distinct Faces of Gender Inequality
The difference between well-being and agency has remarkable analytical reach, and I shall draw again on this conceptual distinction later on in this essay. But before that I would like to discuss the wide range of variations between the different ‘faces’ of gender inequality.3
I shall examine the distinct phenomena under the following headings:
(1) survival inequality;
(2) natality inequality;
(3) unequal facilities;
(4) ownership inequality;
(5) unequal sharing of household benefits and chores; and
(6) domestic violence and physical victimization.
Given the demographic and social complexity in identifying and understanding the first two categories, I shall concentrate on them in particular, and refer to the others only rather rapidly.
Survival Inequality
In many parts of the world, gender inequality takes the savage form of unusually high mortality rates of women and a consequent preponderance of men in the total population. This contrasts particularly sharply with the preponderance of women found in societies with little or no gender bias in health care and nutrition. It has been widely ob
served that, given similar health care and nutrition, women tend typically to have lower age-specific mortality rates than men. It is interesting that even female fetuses tend to have a lower probability of miscarriage than male fetuses. Even though, everywhere in the world, more male babies are born than female babies (and an even higher proportion of male fetuses are conceived than female fetuses), in those places in which men and women receive similar health care and attention, the overabundance of men is gradually reduced and then reversed. So the populations of Europe and North America have about 105 or more females per 100 males, and this higher female–male ratio (of about 1.05 or 1.06) comes about as a result of the greater survival chance of females in different age groups.
In contrast with this pattern, in many regions of the world, women receive less – sometimes far less – care than men, and in particular, girls often receive very much less support than boys. As a result of this gender bias in health care and social attention, mortality rates of females are unusually high compared with what may be expected from the local male mortality rates. Indeed, quite often female mortality rates actually exceed the male rates, in total contrast with what is biologically expected and what is actually observed in the pattern of mortality in Europe and North America.