In 1989, Amartya Sen offered a lucid, comparative assessment of India’s development experience in the first four decades since 1947. Post-1947 India did not have post-1949 China’s direct and massive public action to improve living conditions. This accounted for the fifteen-year difference in average life expectancy in the two countries by the late 1980s. If India had China’s lower mortality rates, “there would have been 3.8 million…