"Rights, deprivation and disparity"

Welfare economics, social choice theory, distributional analysis, and poverty assessments are all-important ingredients of problems in concepts and measurement. These problems, in turn, have a bearing on the normative evaluation and critical description of development issues and policy intervention. As such, they constitute an important part of the normal discourse and activity of all involved citizens of a country. The issues under consideration in this book are therefore too important to be left entirely, or even in large measure, to the mercies of the 'specialist'. The role of the latter is perhaps best confined to the endeavour of elucidating the analytical bases of such notions as freedom, liberty, inequality, and deprivation which all of us habitually think and talk about. This book, which is a collection of work done on these themes over a period of two decades, is an attempt at such elucidation. The underlying effort has been to deal with the salient conceptual issues informing the book's concerns in direct and straightforward way.