Human Insecurity in South Asia: Challenging Market Injustice

Abstract

The article addresses the issue of social injustice by stressing on the need for social action through state initiatives for uplifting the underprivileged segments of society. 1 It is argued that while human insecurity impacts all classes of people, it is asymmetrically distributed across South Asian societies where the resource-deprived remain more vulnerable than the more privileged members of the society. Evidences show that market forces remain one of the most important drivers of insecurity. While the ruling elite has attempted to address problems of human insecurity through various welfare palliatives ranging from feeding the vulnerable to providing shelter and subsistence income support, it is the modern welfare state that remains capable of undertaking the most institutionalised public policies to address the more fundamental sources of human insecurity. The author argues that challenging human insecurity remains a more relevant response to the conditions of human deprivation than the more conventional policy objective of moving households above a given poverty line. To that end, social protection programmes need to move beyond the protection of individual risks to address more substantive market-driven risks which originate from the structural injustices of society. A body of ideas has been outlined to reduce vulnerabilities which can provide the basis for further debate. Individual countries in South Asia may draw on these ideas to calibrate their agendas for structural change to the specific institutional arrangements and underlying political economy of their respective societies.