PUBLIC EYE - THE SUPERPOWERS OF GANDHIAN AUSTERITY

by SUNIL KHILNANI


In his book, Imagining India, Nandan Nilekani writes: “Wherever I go, I find that Indians know our growth numbers backward and forward, and there is a strong, common feeling among us that our country has finally come of age.“ It's something I've seen even in the slums of Mumbai: The statistics of India's new growth economy grip the popular imagination. Children who scavenge trash for a living report confidently and accurately that India is the second-fastest growing economy in th world, and see in the numbers a happier future for themselves.

Strikingly, this Indian trust in economic improvement as a means of greater happiness coincides with something of a countermovement among economists in the West. Some of the best of them now argue that, r beyond a certain point, economic growth doesn't in fact result in national contentment. It's an argument Mahatma Gandhi actually made one hundred years ago, though today's economists have regression analysis to work with. The distinguished economist Richard Layard writes of the citizens of the Western countries he's studied, “In the last 50 years...They have become much richer, they work much less, they have e longer holidays, they travel more, they live longer, and they are healthier. But they are no happier.“ Layard, along with Nobel laureates such as Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz as well as Partha Dasgupta have been trying to work out new, non-economic statistical measures to gauge national well-being, including quality of life and ecological sustainability.


In the advanced industrial countries, governments too are seeking to build some of these apparently new ideas into their assessments of how their citizenry is doing. It was Nicolas Sarkozy who invited Sen, Stiglitz and the French economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi to prepare a report outlining a new, more differentiated gauge of economic prosperity and human well-being.

And in the US, President Obama has signed into law the creation of a new system of “key national indicators“, a “dashboard“ of measures (developed by a NGO project called The State of the USA--also the name of the website at which the information is posted) which aim to give a picture of national well-being that is fuller than the simplicities of GDP and growth statistics.

Gandhi would have been pleased to hear of such developments. “The rich are often unhappy, the poor happy,“ he wrote in Hind Swaraj in 1909. He counted himself among the latter group, though I confess I've never thought of him as a good example of someone who knew how to be happy.

He was too obsessed by self-mortifying experiments, and his household was hardly a cheerful one, given his sometimes disdainful and ferocious treatment of his wife and his children.

The Gandhi family was not a Happy Family. But Gandhi was someone who thought a lot about well-being as a psychological condition, and understood that the link between