For Sen (1999), development involves reducing deprivation or broadening choice.

Deprivation represents a multidimensional view of poverty that includes hunger, illiteracy, illness
and poor health, powerlessness, voicelessness, insecurity, humiliation, and a lack of access to basic
infrastructure (Narayan et al. 2000, pp. 4-5).

Overcoming deprivations is central to development.

Unfreedoms include hunger, famine, ignorance, an unsustainable economic life, unemployment,

barriers to economic fulfilment by women or minority communities, premature death, violation of
political freedom and basic liberty, threats to the environment, and little access to health,
sanitation, or clean water. Freedom of exchange, labour contract, social opportunities, and
protective security are not just ends or constituent components of development but also important
means to development and freedom.

Sen's welfare theory relies not on individuals' attainments (of basic needs) but individuals'
capabilities.

Sen focuses on a small number of basic functionings central to well-being, such as being
adequately nourished, avoiding premature mortality, appearing in public without shame, being
happy, and being free.

The capability approach was first developed by Amartya Sen in the 1980s (Sen 1985). The
fundamental basis of this approach is the creation of freedoms or capabilities to enable individuals
to live a life in which they have choice.

In broad terms, the capability approach comprises a number of elements primarily concerned with
enabling the capabilities of individuals to live a life that they value and make the choices that fulfil
them.
According to Sen, when examining well-being, the most important factor to consider is what
individuals are able to be or to do; which Sen labels ‘functionings’.

While functionings describe what individuals are able to be or to do, capabilities describe the
freedoms of choice or opportunities available to achieve these functionings.

Therefore, an individual’s capabilities represents their capacity to choose between various

functionings to create a life they value.

The capability approach provides an answer to the question ‘what constitutes development’.
Within the capability approach the purpose of development is to improve the lives of individuals
within a community. While this does not differ from the development objective of the human rights
framework, what does differ is what comprises this improvement. Within the human rights
framework, poverty is viewed as the deprivation of human rights. Therefore development is seen
as the fulfilment of human rights. However, as noted earlier, there are issues with viewing
development in this way. Alternatively, the capability approach views the improvement of
peoples’ lives as the expansion of individuals’ capabilities. It is in expanding these capabilities
that people have the capacity to live a life in which they have choice.

Within the perspective of human rights the scope of development extends to fulfilling an
individual’s human right, there is no mention of the role of development beyond the attainment of
these rights. However, the scope of development within the capability approach extends to include
any capabilities that improve the lives of individuals.

A discourse centered on levels of income is inadequate and misleading, Sen argues. The relief of
poverty is not an end in itself, but a means to allow people full lives. If the goal of promoting
development is for poor people to achieve basic human freedoms, then we should concentrate on
that central objective rather than on the usual proxies for successful development, such as increases
in gross national product (GNP) or per capita income. Substantive freedoms are for Sen
constitutive of development, while development itself is thoroughly dependent on the achievement
of substantive freedoms. This achievement is both an end and a means to that end. Sen considers
five basic human freedoms. These are

(1) political freedoms (opportunities for people to determine who governs them);
(2) economic facilities (opportunities to use economic resources for the purposes of consumption,
production, or exchange);
(3) social opportunities (for such resources as health care and education);
(4) transparency guarantees (the freedom for people to deal with each other under conditions of
disclosure and lucidity); and
(5) protective security (including safety net provisions for the unemployed and indigent).

For example, the citizens of Gabon or South Africa or Namibia or Brazil may be much richer in
terms of per capita GNP than the citizens of Sri Lanka or China or the state of Kerala in India, but
the latter have very substantially higher life expectancies than do the former” (pp. 5–6). To use an
American example, African Americans as a group are very many times richer in income terms
than the people of China or Kerala, even when adjusting for cost-of-living differences, but they
have a lower chance of reaching an advanced age than people in either of those places.

While both China and India have moved to a more open economy, China has achieved more
success in growth because of prior commitments to basic health and education services. So the
Chinese people, because they were better educated and healthier, were more able to take advantage
of market opportunities than the people of India.
The human development and capability approach (in brief: ‘capability approach’1) aspires to re-
orient approaches to socio-economic development and public policy, away from taking economic
growth and/or declared subjective well-being as the overriding objectives, and towards improving
the ability of persons to lead a life that they have reason to value.

He argues that at the very root of development or poverty is the question of whether any expansion
among the individuals’ freedoms has taken place

Take the case of an individual who possesses the capability to work but is impeded by the lack of
“adequate” job opportunities for instance. He has somehow been capability-deprived and put in a
condition of unfreedom.
The task of development thus is two-fold: (1) One focuses on the process of diminishing the
conditions that obstruct the unimpeded exercise of pursuing the life one chooses to live, and
(2) the other focuses on the opportunities of augmenting the variety of choices to allow one
the freedom to actually choose. As earlier mentioned, development is interested in enabling
persons as free agents to exercise rationally this capacity of pursuing the life they desire to
live. In the first case, development has something to do with facilitating the exercise of
freedom as means while the second case sees development as facilitating the acquisition of
freedom as an end. Using the language Sen uses, he would state that development involves
both processes and opportunities.

Unlike more traditional economic theories that focused more on considering the influence of
incomes, wealth and utilities on development, These are all important but are means and not ends.
Development can be seen as a process of expanding the freedoms that people enjoy.

Development requires the removing of major sources of unfreedom

Freedoms are not only the primary ends of development; they are also among its principal means.
There are five distinct types of freedom, seen in this instrumental perspective: 1.political
freedoms,2. economic facilities, 3. social opportunities, 4. transparency guarantees, 5.protective
security.
In strictly economic terms, development has traditionally meant achieving sustained rates of
growth of income per capita to enable a nation to expand its output at a rate faster than the growth
rate of its population.

With few exceptions, such as in development policy circles in the 1970s, development was until
recently nearly always seen as an economic phenomenon in which rapid gains in overall and per
capita GNI growth would either “trickle down” to the masses in the form of jobs and other
economic opportunities or create the necessary conditions for the wider distribution of the
economic and social benefits of growth. Problems of poverty, discrimination, unemployment, and
income distribution were of secondary importance to “getting the growth job done.” Indeed, the
emphasis is often on increased output, measured by gross domestic product (GDP).

During the 1970s, economic development came to be redefined in terms of the reduction or
elimination of poverty, inequality, and unemployment within the context of a growing economy.
“Redistribution from growth” became a common slogan.

Freedom of choice, or control of one’s own life, is itself a central aspect of most understandings
of well-being. A functioning is a valued “being or doing,” and in Sen’s view, functionings that
people have reason to value can range from being healthy, being well-nourished, and well-clothed,
to being mobile, having self-esteem, and “taking part in the life of the community.”9

Sen then defines capabilities as “the freedom that a person has in terms of the choice of
functionings.

For Sen, human “well-being” means being well, in the basic sense of being healthy, well nourished,
well clothed, literate, and long-lived, and more broadly, being able to take part in the life of the
community, being mobile, and having freedom of choice in what one can become and can do.

Development can be seen, it is argued here, as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people
enjoy.

Growth of GNP or of individual incomes can, of course, be very important as means to expanding
the freedoms enjoyed by the members of the society. But freedoms depend also on other
determinants, such as social and economic arrangements (for example, facilities for education and
health care) as well as political and civil rights (for example, the liberty to participate in public
discussion and scrutiny). Similarly, industrialization or technological progress or social
modernization can substantially contribute to expanding human freedom, but freedom depends on
other influences as well. If freedom is what development advances, then there is a major argument
for concentrating on that overarching objective, rather than on some particular means, or some
specially chosen list of instruments. Viewing development in terms of expanding substantive
freedoms directs attention to the ends that make development important, rather than merely to
some of the means that, inter alia, play a prominent part in the process.

Development requires the removal of major sources of unfreedam: poverty as well as tyranny,
poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities
as well as intolerance or overactivity of repressive states. Despite unprecedented increases in
overall opulence, the contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to vast numbers-perhaps
even the majority of people. Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to
economic poverty, which robs people of the freedom to satisfy hunger, or to achieve sufficient
nutrition, or to obtain remedies for treatable illnesses, or the opportunity to be adequately clothed
or sheltered, or to enjoy clean water or sanitary facilities.

the violation of freedom results directly from a denial of political and civil liberties by authoritarian
regimes and from imposed restrictions on the freedom to participate in the social, political and
economic life of the community.