Amartya Sen hails Delhi government's odd-even rule

Amartya Sen praised the Delhi government's car rationing 'odd-even' scheme.

New Delhi: Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen today praised the Delhi government's car rationing 'odd-even' scheme saying he salutes the effort as air quality in India was in many ways worse than that of Beijing.

"I think, the most important thing that we learn from the odd and even (scheme) is that it is not just odd and even, which I of course salute, and I am delighted that Delhi population has lived up to the expectations. But it is important to think of a problem before it arises," he said.

Sen, who won Nobel Prize for his contribution to welfare economics in 1998, was speaking in the "Nobel Solutions Summit" where six Nobel laureates from different fields of expertise from around the world came together to discuss biggest problems of mankind and propose possible solutions. Drawing a sketchy comparison between the pollution and air quality between the Indian and the Chinese capitals, he said, "I think the difficulty is certain types of pollution are easy to see like the one in Beijing."

"Unfortunately in Delhi, we have had the kind of pollution which is not easy to see and so it generates a sense that it is not there. We certainly have fog but not the kind of thick smog that Beijing has even though our air is probably worse than that, in many ways definitely worse than that," he said.