Books like An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions by Jean Drèze

India Unbound charts the nation’s rapid social, political, and economic transformation over the last fifty years, blending personal narrative with analytical insight into its rise as a free‑market democracy and information‑economy power.

Amartya Sen’s 1999 book analyzes international development as a process of expanding human freedom.

This book presents an analysis of endemic deprivation in India, and of the role of public action in addressing that problem. The analysis is based on a broad view of economic development, focusing on human well-being and social opportunity rather than on the standard indicators of economic growth. India's success in reducing endemic deprivation since Independence has been quite limited. Recent diagnoses of this failure of policy have concentrated on the counterproductive role of government regulation, and on the need for economic incentives to accelerate the growth of the economy. This book argues that an assessment of India's failure to eliminate basic deprivations has to go beyond this limited focus, and to take note of the role played in that failure by inadequate public involvement in the promotion of basic education, health care, social security, and related entitlements. Even the fostering of fast and participatory economic growth requires some basic social change, which is not addressed by liberalization and economic incentives alone. The authors also discuss the historical antecedents of these political and social neglects, including the distortion of policy priorities arising from inequalities of political power. The book considers the scope for public action to address these earlier biases and achieve a transformation of policy priorities.

Two of India's leading economists argue that, despite economic development, there must be a greater understanding of inequalities in India. - When India became independent in 1947 after two centuries of colonial subjugation, it immediately - and quite successfully - adopted a firmly democratic political system, with multiple parties, freedom of speech and extensive political rights. The famines that had been so common in colonial days disappeared, and steady economic growth replaced the almost complete stagnation characteristic of the long rule of the Raj. The growth of the Indian economy, which quickened over the last three decades, became the second fastest in the world. Despite a recent dip, it is still one of the highest among nations. Maintaining rapid as well as environmentally sustainable growth remains an important and achieveable goal for India. In An Uncertain Glory, two of India's leading economists argue that the country's main problems lie elsewhere, particularly in the lack of attention paid to the essential needs of the people, especially the poor. The deep inequalities in Indian society tend to constrict public discussion in India's vibrant media to the lives and concerns of the relatively affluent.One of the biggest failures has been the very inadequate use of the public resources generated by economic growth to expand India's lagging physical and social infrastructure (in sharp contrast, for example, to what China has done): there is a continued inadequacy both of social services such as schooling, medical care and immunization, and of physical services such as the provision of safe water, electricity, drainage and sanitation. Even as India has overtaken a large number of other countries in the rate of economic growth, it has, because of these inadequacies, fallen behind many of the same countries - often very poor ones - in the progress of quality of life. Because of the importance of democracy in India, addressing these failures will require not only significant policy rethinking by the government, but also a better public understanding of the abysmal extent of these social and economic deprivations. This book makes a powerful contribution to that understanding.

Presents an analysis of what justice is, the transcendental theory of justice and its drawbacks, and a persuasive argument for a comparative perspective on justice that can guide us in the choice between alternatives.