In late June, a television reporter named Narayan Pargaien spent three days in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand to cover the region’s devastating monsoon floods, which have killed more than 5,700 people. Like most journalists covering the disaster, Pargaien dutifully described families who had lost everything, including their modest thatch-roofed homes. Unlike most journalists, Pargaien reported from the scene while perched on the shoulders of a flood victim in the middle of a swollen river. As the outrage poured in, Pargaien tried to explain himself. In an interview with the Indian Web site Newslaundry, he said the man who carried him had insisted upon it. “He was grateful to us and wanted to show me some respect,” Pargaien said, “as it was the first time someone of my level had visited his house.”

The India captured in that image — a preening consumer economy built on the backs of the destitute — is the subject of “An Uncertain Glory,” a new book by the economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen that aims to bring the poor to the center of public discussion about the country’s future. It’s an urgent, passionate, political work that makes the case that India cannot move forward without investing significantly — as every other major industrialized country has already done — in public services: “The lack of health care, tolerably good schools and other basic facilities important for human well-being and elementary freedoms, keeps a majority of Indians shackled to their deprived lives in a way quite rarely seen in other self-respecting countries that are trying to move ahead in the world.”

Sen, who won the Nobel in economic science in 1998, and Drèze, his longtime collaborator, begin by retelling the story of India’s recent economic boom. They show that, leaving aside per capita income, which has grown impressively, India is actually falling behind its neighbors in South Asia — never mind America, Europe and China — in every social indicator that matters, from literacy to child malnutrition to access to toilets. The chapter on the country’s woeful schools is a welcome corrective to the idea of India as a nation of brilliant, job-stealing engineers. In fact, large numbers of Indian ­primary-school students are unable to write a simple sentence or do basic arithmetic. In an alarming chapter on health, Drèze and Sen point out that while the Taliban’s opposition to polio vaccines in Pakistan has rightly ­created an international furor, there is scant attention paid to India’s dismal rates of child immunization, which are among the lowest in the world, “even without a ­Taliban.”

These comparisons are rhetorical tools; the authors use them to show that India’s problems can’t be attributed to culture or democracy or a lack of tax revenue. Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka are all messy, multiparty democracies with deeply conservative religious traditions and legacies of colonial oppression. And yet, with fewer resources, they have made solid progress in improving health and education while India stagnates.