Economic Well-Being And Political Action

If one were to look at the process of economic development as one where individuals experience improvements in the scope of the choices that they can meaningfully exercise and are reasonably free to develop their latent abilities, without suffering from limitations of birth, sex, caste, creed, language, class, etc, then social development becomes tantamount to economic development. Adopting this broader view of economic development, means a commitment to seeing economic policies largely in terms of their ability to relax the restrictions on individual choice. What are the dynamics of making economic policy work towards the goal of a broader conception of economic development? This paper argues that politics of the deprived, based on an identity of the deprived as deprived, is central to the successful operation of such policy.