Professor Amartya Sen, the noted economist-philosopher, became the first Asian economist and the sixth Indian to get the coveted Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for 1998, instituted by the Bank of Sweden in the memory of Alfred Nobel. The citation of the Royal Swedish Academy, which decides upon the Nobel Prizes, highlights Sen's empirical studies on famines, and draws attention to his 'several key contributions to welfare economics ...'
Sen was born in Santiniketan in 1933. He was named 'Amartya'- 'the one who deserves immortality/ by Rabindranath Tagore who was himself the first to put India on the Nobel Prize map. "I can see the boy will grow into an outstanding person," the poet told Amartya's parents.
As a schoolboy in Santiniketan, Sen thought variously of becoming a Sanskrit scholar like his grandfather, a mathematician another time, and a couple of years later, a physicist. But when he entered Calcutta's Presidency College, after topping the intermediate examination, he was in no doubt about his true calling - Economics. Destiny, perhaps, also played a part in this. As a boy of ten, he had witnessed the horrors of the Bengal famine of 1943, a man-made catastrophe in which five million people died. He had seen people dying in front of his house. He recalls, "The streets were full of emaciated looking faces and people were dying in very large numbers. It made me think about what causes famine and when I took on the famine work in a formal way 30 years later, I was still quite haunted by the memories of that period."
Sen started his career as a Professor of Economics at Jadavpur University. He then shifted to the Delhi School of Economics where he taught for eight years. Then, he moved to the London School of Economics before becoming the Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford. Subsequently, he was Professor of Economics and Philosophy for nearly a decade at the Harvard University (USA). He left this prestigious job to take over as Master of Trinity College at Cambridge - a singularly honoured position, as no Indian had ever occupied it till then.
Prof. Sen has always been a good communicator. As a distinguished teacher, he has produced a generation of students and admirers in India and abroad. He is also a prolific writer. He has authored 21 books, apart from nearly 200 research papers and articles. His writings span many areas. In all his works, his fundamental concern has been the well-being of the people, especially the poor, He has analysed the causes of famine and starvation. In one of his famous books Poverty and Famines - An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, he challenged the popular notion that the shortage of food was the most important cause of famine.
