What people are given,
and what they can actually do
Amartya Sen’s capability approach, made clickable. Seven resources followed along the chain that runs from what a programme provides to what a person is genuinely able to do with it, and on to what they end up doing. Open any resource for the Indian survey, statute or judgment at each step, with the source and year given.
Each chain also says what it leaves unsettled.
The approach belongs to Amartya Sen, developed across “Equality of What?” (1979), Commodities and Capabilities (1985) and Development as Freedom (1999). The list of ten central capabilities is Martha Nussbaum’s. ImpactMojo added the Indian evidence. Full credits ↓
98.1% of rural children are enrolled. 44.8% of Std V children in government schools can read a Std II text.
Both figures are from the same survey in the same year. The first counts a resource; the second asks about a capability. Sen’s argument is that development gets measured almost entirely in the first kind of number, and that the two can move apart for reasons that are neither accidental nor mysterious.
Where the approach is contested
Its most persistent criticism is that it resists measurement. Sen declined for decades to publish a fixed list of capabilities, holding that the selection is a public and political judgment rather than a philosopher’s. Martha Nussbaum disagreed and published ten. That disagreement is unresolved, and both positions are set out below rather than merged.
A second objection is practical: if capability is hard to observe and resources are easy to count, a government under pressure to report progress will keep reporting resources. The approach diagnoses the problem more comfortably than it solves it.
And a capability is not a functioning. Someone who fasts and someone who is starving have the same nutritional outcome and entirely different freedom. The distinction matters most exactly where it is hardest to observe.
Four stages, and the gaps between them
The picture below is the whole argument. Each gap between two stages is a place where something intervenes to decide how much of the resource becomes freedom.
Seven resources, followed to the end
Pick a resource. On a keyboard, tab to one and press Enter; the panel’s buttons move between them, and Escape clears. Every resource has its own shareable link.
Nussbaum’s ten, and why Sen would not write them
Martha Nussbaum argued that an approach with no list cannot ground a constitutional claim, and published ten central capabilities she holds every government owes its people at a threshold level. Sen’s objection was never to these ten in particular; it was that fixing any list removes from public reasoning a choice that belongs to it.
Why this matters in Indian practice
The Indian Constitution already reads much like a capability list. The Directive Principles name livelihood, health, education and a living wage; the Supreme Court has read the right to life in Article 21 to include food, shelter, health, a clean environment and sanitation. India did not need Nussbaum’s list to arrive at a threshold account of what the state owes.
What the approach adds is the question of what a guarantee is measured in. A right to education discharged in school places and a right to education discharged in reading are the same right and a different programme.
Whose approach this is
The capability approach
Amartya Sen, developed from the 1979 Tanner Lecture “Equality of What?” through Commodities and Capabilities (1985) and Development as Freedom (1999). The distinction between resources, capabilities and functionings, and the account of conversion factors, are his.
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, 1998
The ten central capabilities
Martha C. Nussbaum, from Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (2000), restated in Creating Capabilities (2011). The list, the threshold argument and the case for constitutional entrenchment are hers.
Reproduced here in summary, for teaching
What ImpactMojo added
The interactive chain, and the Indian evidence: the survey, statute or judgment at each step of seven resources, each with a named source and year, plus a note on what the chain does not settle.
ImpactMojo, 2026 · content CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · code MIT
Sources drawn on
ASER 2024 · NSS 76th Round and 80th Round, MoSPI · NFHS-5 (2019–21) · Right to Education Act (2009) · Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin) · National Food Security Act (2013) · PUCL v. Union of India (2001) · Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act (2016) · Muralidharan & Prakash, AEJ: Applied Economics (2017) · Drèze & Sen, An Uncertain Glory (2013) · Sen, BMJ (2002) · UNDP Human Development Report (1990).
Using this in a workshop
Take a programme the group works on and write down what it provides. Then ask what a person would have to be able to do for that provision to have worked, and what stands between the two for the hardest-placed person it serves. The gap between those two sentences is usually where the programme’s evaluation should have been pointed.
If you reproduce the approach, credit Sen; if you reproduce the ten, credit Nussbaum. If you reproduce this evidence, credit ImpactMojo and check the figures against their sources first.