Is there something common between the West Bengal government and successful NGOs in Bangladesh? Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen thinks there is. He uses the example of Muhammad Yunus, the Grameen Bank founder who won the Nobel Peace Prize this year, to shed light on West Bengal government’s eagerness to attract corporate investment like the Tatas.

“Major NGOs in Bangladesh began with the same kind of background as I did — they were educated, middle-class Bengalis, left of the centre, interested in equality and untrusting of the markets. However, they realized that they had to play the market economy not kick it, yet not rely on it. The West Bengal

government is doing exactly the same,’’ Sen said today.

The flowering of NGOs in Bangladesh illustrates the same — market friendly not market dependent. Microcredit, according to Sen, is both pro and anti-market. Microcredit is not capital producing, yet to use the credit somewhere, they need the market. According to him, this is exactly where the reforms in Bengal are going.

“People often ask me if I am pro or anti-market? I can be anti-market if all of us agree to grow everything for ourselves. It is like asking should conversation be banned just because there is hate-speech?’’ he said.

Sen was speaking at the launch of a book Locked Homes and Empty Schools: The impact of distress seasonal migration of the rural poor brought out by the America India Foundation. It documents the plight of 30 million people who are forced to migrate annually. He admitted he was shocked by the scale of movement and intensity of problems. It was even more startling for him as in his seminal work on the Bengal famine, he said he found that people were “sedentary in distress”’ with few families migrating to Orissa and Bihar.

Taking forward the point on market economy, Sen said: “The market economy will not be interested in running hostels and schools for these migrants. They have nothing to gain. Yet, they will gain by addressing issues of poverty in rural areas,’’ he said.