Status Updates From An Economist in the Real Wo...

The British rulers of India did declare sati criminal, as additional deterrent for those who abetted sati, declared the witnessing of sati also a crime. This tragic ritual flourished during the British period. There were many reasons for this, but one factor cannot be ignored. Every time a case of sati came up in the courts, somehow it was impossible to find witnesses. Clearly the law had created a catch-22.

In a globalised society, noble ambitions of equality by a government in the form of taxation, may hurt the people the government was trying to save in the first place; while this is true, Kaushik Basu does not offer much in the form of suggestions, let alone solutions, to counter this problem!

“to ask for democracy and then to specify what the democracy must choose amounts to a contradiction. Since most developing countries were not democracies they did not face this problem, but India did.”