ISAS Working Papers

Addressing the Constituent Assembly in the opening debate on ‘The Resolution of Aims and Objects’, on 22 January 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru said: ‘The first task of this Assembly is to free India through a new constitution, to feed the starving people, and to clothe the naked masses, and to give every Indian the fullest opportunity to develop himself according to his capacity’ (cited in Corbridge and Harriss 2000: 20). This is a remarkable statement, expressing as it seems to a conception of what development should mean that comes very close to the one that Amartya Sen laid out much more recently, of development as freedom (Sen 1999).