India experienced several turbulent decades after the official takeover by the British Crown, following the Indian Mutiny, in 1858. Becoming an official territory of the British Empire came with promises of progress. Already by the 1870s, though, the promises seemed hollow. The textile industry, once a flourishing sector that supplied fabrics to most of the world, was dwindling. The average Indian was sinking into deeper poverty. And millions died in the three largest famines of India’s history between 1873 and 1901. It goes without saying that India’s large territory, rich history and its dependent position within the British Empire rendered its context dense and complex. India was extensively linked to the global economy and had a long history of trading in the subcontinent, primarily in textiles during the Mughal period, and later as one of the main suppliers of raw materials to the growing textile industry in Manchester in northern England. This chapter aims to contextualise the first generation of modern Indian economists by identifying the major trends and events affecting India in the past four decades of the nineteenth century.

Description: The past experienced major pandemics and famines. For a long time, the growth of the population was controlled by a somewhat rigid version of the Malthusian Theory, by lack of food. In the past two centuries, that theory played less of a role than it had in the distant past because of the Industrial Revolution and more arable lands in Argentina, Australia, and the USA. <break>However, in the past two centuries there were occasional crop failures, in India and in China, which at times sharply reduced the supply of food, causing major famines. Some of these famines killed millions of people. Epidemics and pandemics also continued to have some impact and occasionally they accompanied the famines, making their impact worse. Human actions had a growing impact on these developments.

This chapter shows that Sen’s (2009) non-welfarist approach to justice is greatly influenced by 1) his work on famines; 2) his empirical work on gender inequalities, specifically within the Indian society, that helped him to refine his approach to hunger; and 3) his involvement in the creation of the human development approach. All these engagements – seemingly completely separate from his theoretical work in welfare economics – have, in fact, fostered the formulation of a novel approach in which agency and public reasoning are the core elements.

Capabilities and Entitlements are distinct and free-standing, but also complementary ideas that inform each other.

The conventional wisdom that human growth is optimal when adequate amounts of all nutrients, minimal infection, and adequate psychosocial stimulation are available is too simplistic. The extensive interacting networks of material, biological, social, and ideological variables that comprise human life give rise to a hugely complicated matrix of factors that shape human phenotypes. There is no single optimal pattern of growth. There are ranges of possibilities with a multitude of local optima within the developmental matrix. The importance of social-economic-political-emotional (SEPE) factors is discussed in relation to new hypotheses of community effects and strategic growth adjustments on human development.