Sen, Amartya. "Quality of Life: India vs. China". The New York Review of Books, 12 May 2011.

Sen, Amartya. "Quality of Life: India vs. China". The New York Review of Books, 12 May 2011.

• Public attention in India and abroad has been focused on India's economic growth compared to China, particularly speculation about whether India will surpass the over 10% growth rate recorded in China in the 2000s. The author says that the focus on GDP growth has obscured the greater differences between India and China, which exist in quality of life and non-economic measures of societal success.
• Focusing just on GDP as a measure of overall wellbeing is extremely dangerous and promotes policies and outlooks that may actually harm many of those suffering within societies. 
• "Life expectancy at birth in China is 73.5 years; in India it is 64.4 years. The infant mortality rate is fifty per thousand in India, compared with just seventeen in China; the mortality rate for children under five is sixty-six per thousand for Indians and nineteen for the Chinese; and the maternal mortality rate is 230 per 100,000 live births in India and thirty-eight in China. The mean years of schooling in India were estimated to be 4.4 years, compared with 7.5 years in China. China’s adult literacy rate is 94 percent, compared with India’s 74 percent according to the preliminary tables of the 2011 census. As a result of India’s effort to improve the schooling of girls, its literacy rate for women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four has clearly risen; but that rate is still not much above 80 percent, whereas in China it is 99 percent. One of the serious failures of India is that a very substantial proportion of Indian children are, to varying degrees, undernourished (depending on the criteria used, the proportion can come close to half of all children), compared with a very small proportion in China. Only 66 percent of Indian children are immunized with triple vaccine (diphtheria/pertussis/tetanus), as opposed to 97 percent in China."
• Some Indian politicians argue that India's high growth rate is achievable because of necessary sacrifices in social spending, but the fact that China eclipses India in terms of both social spending and economic growth falsifies this theory.
• India is around twice as wealthy per capita as Bangladesh, with average incomes of $1,170 versus $590 per annum, but ranks significantly lower than Bangladesh on most indices of social wellbeing.
• "Life expectancy in Bangladesh is 66.9 years compared with India’s 64.4. The proportion of underweight children in Bangladesh (41.3 percent) is lower than in India (43.5), and its fertility rate (2.3) is also lower than India’s (2.7). Mean years of schooling amount to 4.8 years in Bangladesh compared with India’s 4.4 years. While India is ahead of Bangladesh in the male literacy rate for the age group between fifteen and twenty-four, the female rate in Bangladesh is higher than in India. [...] The mortality rate of children under five is sixty-six per thousand in India compared with fifty-two in Bangladesh. In infant mortality, Bangladesh has a similar advantage: it is fifty per thousand in India and forty-one in Bangladesh. While 94 percent of Bangladeshi children are immunized with DPT vaccine, only 66 percent of Indian children are."
• One of the greatest benefits of GDP growth is that it supplies substantial more taxable revenue streams for governments to use for social improvement and investment. Moreover, taxable resources tend to grow at a faster rate than total GDP. For example, tax revenue in India has increased four-fold between 1990 and 2010.
• India has increased investment of tax revenue into social welfare, but much less so than other countries. Indian per capita expenditure on healthcare, for example, is 1/5 that of Chinese expenditure, or under 1% of GDP compared to approximately 2% of GDP.
• Healthcare coverage in India is extremely low, with the majority of the population dependent on private doctors, many of whom are poorly trained or unlicensed. As a result, most poor people do not have access to proper medical care. Some private doctors also take advantage of poor patients by exploiting them for treatment that they do not need.
• India has a democratic governance structure with an independent media that is often fiercely critical of the government. Economic growth has allowed for the both the growth of newspapers and the expansion of radio and television networks throughout the country, increasingly the diversity and availability of information. This all in contrast to the closed state-run news media of China.
• Prior to the 1980s, many argued that democracy impeded strong economic growth, something that the success of the Indian economy in the 1990s and onwards has disproved. The larger issue facing Indian democracy is whether a democratic system can redress economic and social inequalities.
• The advantage of a democratic system is demonstrated by the great famine of China during Chairman Mao, a phenomenon that would not have occurred in a democracy like India. The dedication of Chinese leadership to establishing social welfare has, however, solved that country's socio-economic problems.
• A privileged minority of the Indian population has benefited enormously from economic growth since the 1990s, and is now entirely independent from government assistance. This class of Indian are predominant in the public sphere and often paint an unhelpfully upbeat view of the country's economic and social conditions, ignoring its deep problems.