What is capability approach? Elaborate the distinctive features of the capability theory of equality. (Answer in 250 words)

- What is capability approach? Elaborate the distinctive features of the capability theory of equality. (Answer in 250 words)
Introduction
The capability approach, founded by Amartya Sen in his 1979 lecture Equality of What?, holds that the right question is not how much people have but what they are actually able to do and be. It answers the question of equality by first fixing the space in which equality is measured.

Body
1. Functionings and capabilities: functionings are beings and doings — being nourished, literate, free of shame, taking part in community life. A capability set is the real freedom to choose among combinations of them.
2. The space of equality: every theory is egalitarian in some space. Sen rejects income and resources, rejects utility, and locates equality in capability, the only space that tracks what people can actually live.
3. Conversion factors: identical bundles of Rawlsian primary goods yield unequal freedom because of personal differences such as disability, social ones such as discrimination, and environmental ones. Resourcism therefore mismeasures the disadvantaged.
4. Adaptive preferences: the utilitarian metric fails because the deprived learn to want little. The contented tamed housewife and the uncomplaining landless labourer register satisfaction while remaining unfree.
5. Freedom, not achievement: the fasting monk and the starving peasant share a functioning but not a capability, so equality of opportunity becomes substantive rather than formal.
6. Plural and contested: capabilities resist collapse into one index, and Sen refuses a fixed list, leaving selection to public reasoning. Nussbaum disagrees, specifying ten central capabilities with a threshold each as constitutional entitlements.

Conclusion
Its distinctiveness lies in relocating equality from goods and feelings to freedoms, which is why it grounds the Human Development Index. The unresolved difficulty is indexing — which capabilities count and by how much — which Sen consigns to democracy and Nussbaum to a list.