I read your piece on Amartya Sen with great interest. I, too, have some reservations on the stand taken by the Nobel laureate. As an economist schooled in the uk and the us , Sen is most likely to ignore poverty's ecological dimensions. But can the people working to alleviate the ecological poverty of the have-nots produce viable answers to correct economic and social disparities? Interestingly, the same issue carries the story of Sukhomajri. This and the experiment of noted Indian activist Anna Hazare are worth examining from the perspective of economic realities. Like ecological realities, economic realities, too, cannot be ignored. Ignoring either tends to simplify the real world situation and you will sow the seeds of failure. For example, idealists during the Indian freedom movement thought