Professor Amartya Sen has advocated important reforms in the realms of primary education and primary health care. What are your suggestions to improve their status and performance?

Introduction

Amartya Sen's capability approach treats basic education and health not as welfare hand-outs but as foundations of freedom and growth — a theme he develops with Jean Dreze in An Uncertain Glory. India's persistent learning deficits and thin primary care validate his call for reform.

Improving primary education

• Raise public spending towards the 6 per cent of GDP goal reiterated by NEP 2020, prioritising foundational stages.
• Universalise foundational literacy and numeracy through the NIPUN Bharat mission, with ASER-style independent measurement of outcomes rather than enrolment alone.
• Strengthen teacher quality and accountability — filling vacancies, curbing absenteeism, continuous training via DIKSHA, and empowered School Management Committees.
• Deepen the education-nutrition link through PM POSHAN and early childhood care in anganwadis, since hungry children cannot learn.

Improving primary health care

• Lift government health expenditure to the National Health Policy 2017 target of 2.5 per cent of GDP, weighted towards primary care.
• Operationalise Ayushman Arogya Mandirs with assured medicines, diagnostics and telemedicine through eSanjeevani.
• Create a trained public health cadre, strengthen ASHA-anganwadi frontline workers, and institute community oversight through Jan Arogya Samitis.
• Attack social determinants — sanitation, nutrition, gender equity — in Sen's spirit of holistic capability building.

Conclusion

Kerala's experience shows early public investment in schooling and primary care yields lasting human development. Outcome-focused funding, accountable frontline institutions and community voice can convert Sen's advocacy into policy reality — these are, as he insists, investments in freedom rather than subsidies.