Amartya Sen

Images : Amartya Sen

General Description
Amartya Kumar Sen, CH Bengali , morto Kumar Shen born 3 November 1933 is an
Indian economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his
contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory and for his interest in the
problems of society s poorest members. 1 Sen was best known for his work on the causes
of famine, which led to the development of practical solutions for preventing or limiting
the effects of real or perceived shortages of food. He is currently the Thomas W. Lamont
University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University.
He is also a senior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a Fellow of Trinity
College, Cambridge, where he previously served as Master from the years 1998 to 2004.
2 3 He is the first Asian and the first Indian academic to head an Oxbridge college.

Amartya Sen's books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He is a trustee
of Economists for Peace and Security. In 2006, Time magazine listed him under "60
years of Asian Heroes" 4 and in 2010 included him in their "100 most influential persons
in the world" 5 .

Sen was born in Santiniketan, West Bengal, the university town established by the poet
Rabindranath Tagore, another Indian Nobel Prize winner. His ancestral home was in
Wari, Dhaka in modern-day Bangladesh. Rabindranath Tagore is said to have given
Amartya Sen his name "Amartya" meaning "immortal" . Sen hails from a distinguished
family his maternal grandfather Kshitimohan Sen, a close associate of Rabindranath
Tagore, was a renowned scholar of medieval Indian literature, an authority on the
philosophy of Hinduism, and also the second Vice Chancellor of Visva-Bharati
University. His maternal grandfather was an uncle of the first Chief Election
Commissioner of India, Sukumar Sen and his brother, Ashoke Kumar Sen, a former Law
Minister of India. Sen's father Ashutosh Sen and mother Amita Sen were born at
Manikganj, Dhaka. His father was a Professor of Chemistry at Dhaka University and
became Chairman of the West Bengal Public Services Commission.

Sen began his high-school education at St Gregory's School in Dhaka in 1941, in modern-
day Bangladesh. His family migrated to India following partition in 1947. Sen studied in
India at the Visva-Bharati University school and Presidency College, Kolkata, where he
earned a First Class First in his B.A. Honours in Economics and emerged as the most
eminent student of the well known batch of 1953. Subsequently in the same year, he
moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he also earned a First Class Starred First
BA Honours in 1956. At Cambridge he was elected as the President of the Cambridge
Majlis in 1956. While still an undergraduate student of Trinity College, he met Prasanta
Chandra Mahalanobis. Mahalanobis, after returning to Calcutta, recommended Sen to
Triguna Sen, the then Education Minister of West Bengal. After Sen had enrolled for a
Ph.D. in Economics to be completed at Trinity College, Cambridge, he arrived in India
on a two year leave. Triguna Sen immediately appointed him as Professor and the
Founder-Head of Department of Economics at Jadavpur University, Calcutta, which was
his very first appointment, at the age of 23. During his tenure at Jadavpur University, he
had the good fortune of having economic methodologist, A. K. Dasgupta, who was then
teaching in Benares, as his supervisor. Sen returned to Cambridge after two years of full
time teaching to complete his Ph.D. in 1959.

Subsequently, Sen won a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College, which gave him four years
of freedom to do anything he liked, during which he took the radical decision of studying
philosophy. That proved to be of immense help to his later research. Sen related the
importance of studying philosophy thus The broadening of my studies into philosophy
was important for me not just because some of my main areas of interest in economics
relate quite closely to philosophical disciplines for example, social choice theory makes
intense use of mathematical logic and also draws on moral philosophy, and so does the
study of inequality and deprivation , but also because I found philosophical studies very
rewarding on their own.

To Sen, then Cambridge was like a battlefield. There were major debates between
supporters of Keynesian economics and the diverse contributions of Keynes followers, on
the one hand, and the neo-classical economists skeptical of Keynes, on the other. Sen was
lucky to have close relations with economists on both sides of the divide. Meanwhile,
thanks to its good practice of democratic and tolerant social choice, Sen s own college,
Trinity College, was an oasis very much removed from the discord. However, because of
a lack of enthusiasm for social choice theory whether in Trinity or Cambridge, Sen had to
choose a quite different subject for his Ph.D. thesis, after completing his B.A. He
submitted his thesis on the choice of techniques in 1959 under the supervision of the
brilliant but vigorously intolerant Joan Robinson. 7 8 During his time at Cambridge, and
according to Quentin Skinner, Sen was a member of the secret society "The Apostles".