Social Opportunities and development

           

Amartya Sen in his book ‘Development as Freedom’ has highlighted the importance of ‘social opportunities’. He explains the creation of social opportunities is important for countries, especially those which are looking for development, in order to achieve development through rapid economic growth. The creation of opportunities includes services as public education, health care, and the development of a free energetic press  (Sen, 2000). He suggests, for instance, the case of Japan which enhanced its economy through social opportunities. Japan became successful to break the chains of general poverty with the help of social opportunities it had created long ago. It had already prepared its people by providing education and health services. The social preparedness of Japan in the form of human development helped it to attain development through rapid economic growth.

           

Not only with Japan, but the social preparedness has significantly helped China to grow its economy. China entered into market-oriented economy in 1979 while India entered in 1991. Both of these countries, in recent years, have been showing a rapid economic growth. But in comparison, India has not been able to grow like China has succeeded. The basic reason behind this is because of the social preparedness. China had always focused in preparing its people with the help of education and health, and thus the prepared people seized the economic opportunities faster as compared to that to India-which could not prepare it people due to many differences.

            

We now assume that the social opportunities, as a long term investment, can be a strong preparation a country can opt for, but how far it is possible for the poor country to provide Universal Education and Health Care is a major concern. The major problem of the poor countries will be in allocating resources to expand public services. But to Sen, it is quite not a problem, because of the relative costs; these social services are relatively inexpensive in poor countries. Therefore, following Support-led development practice, a country need not wait to become richer in order to expand its economy. This way a country can prepare itself, provide its people with health and education-that ultimately make them capable for economic reasoning. This will lead them to economic prosperity like it did to China and Japan.

            

If we attempt to analyze the case of Nepal with the concept of ‘Support-led development’, then the picture becomes bit clear. Nepal has already entered into the market oriented economy. However, Poverty has been the major problem of Nepal since ages. Development plans and policies, in recent years, have explicitly mentioned poverty in their main objectives. The country is listed as a poor and under-developing in the global context. Likewise, the country does not have a strong economy to support a huge expansion in its social opportunities like health and education. However, the country has been investing a lot-with the help of foreign loans and aid-in education (17 per cent of total Budget which is 40 per cent out of 43 per cent that is allocated for social sectors). The results are also coming satisfactory, for instance, 94.7 per cent population, until 2011/12, have access to primary schools within the distance of thirty minutes. Keeping all these issues in mind, it can be concluded that, being a poor country, Nepal has not opted to wait to become rich to provide education and health to its people, which is praiseworthy. Equally important are highest political will and effective policy implementation to which Nepal is still struggling.