Amartya Kumar Sen (born November 3, 1933) is an Indian economist best known for his work on famine, human develop-ment theory, welfare economics, and the underlying mechanisms of poverty. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in welfare economics in 1998 and the Bharat Ratna in 1999.
Sen first studied in India at the Presidency College, Kolkata and the Delhi School of Economics before moving to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned a BA in 1956 and then a Ph.D. in 1959. He has taught economics at Calcutta, Delhi, Oxford, London School of Economics, Harvard and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, between 1997 and 2004. In January 2004 Sen returned to Harvard, where he currently teaches.
Sen’s best-known work is his 1981 volume ‘Poverty and Famines’: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, in which he demonstrated that famine occurs not from a lack of food, but from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing food. In addition to his important work on the causes of famines, Sen’s work in the field of development economics has had considerable influence in the formulation of the Human Development Report, published by the United Nations Development Programme.
Sen was a ground-breaker among late twentieth-century eco-nomists in his insistence on asking questions of value, long removed from ‘serious’ economic consideration. He mounted one of the few major challenges to the economic model that posited self-interest as the prime motivating factor of human activity. His work helped to re-prioritise a significant sector of economists and development workers, even the policies of the United Nations.
Amartya Sen, in 1998, became the first Indian and the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. He was praised by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences ‘for his contributions to welfare economics’ and for restoring ‘an ethical dimension’ to the discussion of vital economic problems.
We Indians are proud of him that gem like Amartya, Sen belongs to our country. He was conferred Bharat Ratna in 1999.
