Amartya Kumar Sen

Born On: November 3, 1933

Born In: Dhaka
Career: Economist/Writer/Professor
Amartya Sen, the recipient of the Nobel Prize and the Bharat Ratna Puruskar, is definitely
one of the most treasured Indian citizens. He has brought in innumerable changes,
revolutionized and challenged existing thought patterns and beliefs in economics and
related fields.

Early Life
Amartya Sen was born in Dhaka which is now the capital city of Bangladesh. He was born in
Santiniketan which was situated in the campus of Rabindranath Tagore's Viswa-Bharti
school/college. Sen's maternal grandfather was a teacher here and his mother had been a
student, so it is not surprising then that Amartya Sen too studied in the same school.
However he did do some of his schooling in St. Gregory before he moved to Santiniketan.
For his higher studies he went to the Presidency College in Calcutta followed by Trinity
College in Cambridge. He completed his B.A. Degree in Economics (Major) and Mathematics
(Minor) from the Presidency College and took up another B.A. in pure Economics at the
Trinity College.

Career
In 1956 Sen returned from Cambridge and was appointed to the chair of the economics
department in a newly opened institution named Jadavpur University. Since he was only
twenty-three years of age, this created dissatisfaction amongst the people there. After
teaching at the University for a couple of years, he returned to Cambridge and took up a
course in philosophy from the Trinity College. In 1963 he came back to India, and joined the
University of Delhi and the Delhi School of Economics as a professor of Economics. In 1970,
he published his first book: Collective Choice and Social Welfare. He left Delhi in the year
1971 due to his wife's deteriorating and moved to London, U.K. The marriage however
eventually did not work out. In 1972, he joined the London School of Economics as a
professor till 1977 after which he joined the University of Oxford. He was the first professor
of economics at Nuffield College, Oxford. He worked there till 1986 and joined Harvard.

Amartya Sen lays claim to a history of writing some of the finest research papers that have
been published. In 1981 he published his paper; 'Poverty and Famines: An Essay in
Entitlement and Deprivation'. He has also written a "Human Development Report",
published in the United Nations Development program. In 1990, he wrote one his most
controversial articles in the New York Review of Books under the title "More Than 100
Million Women Are Missing". He has also authored about twenty books and they have been
translated into many prominent languages too.

Contribution
Through his research in economics and related fields he has set new standards governments
and international organizations. Today Sen has managed to influence authorities to not just
find out ways of alleviating suffering, but to find ways through which there can be a
replacement for the lost income of the poor. Another important contribution of Sen was
seen in the area of economy development where he introduced the concept of 'capability'
through his research article "Equality of What".
One notable example of Amartya Sen’s contribution is the capability approach to
development economics, to which he was a major contributor.
The capability approach is a theoretical framework that has helped inform efforts to
promote economic development and poverty alleviation. In addition to its academic
interest, the capability approach has informed the creation of new statistical indices that
help governments and policymakers to track the well-being of citizens in a more robust and
appropriate manner.

For example, the capability approach contributed to the creation of the Human
Development Index (HDI), a composite measure of life expectancy, per-capita income, and
education that is used to estimate the economic development of societies. HDI can be used
alongside traditional economic measures such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to offer a
more nuanced and complete perspective on the economic well-being of a nation.

And the second contribution of Sen was to carried out massive work on poverty and
inequality in India. Sen’s major point has been that the gap simplicity approach will not
do. The distribution of income/consumption among the persons below the poverty line
is to be taken into account.

One has to be assumed that the initial distribution below poverty line would remain
more and less unchanged. The intuitive finding was that the more skewed the
distribution below the poverty line, the larger would be the Sen gap. Sen produced a
neat formula, termed as the poverty measure, known as the Sen index.

P = [1 + (1-1) G ] H

Where P is the poverty index, 1 is the measure of distribution, G is the Gini coefficient,
and H is the head count proportion of the people below the poverty line. The
procedures adopted by Sen, seems to treat the inequality measure about the poverty
line and that the poverty line as largely independent of each other.

Sen measure is sensitive to changes in distribution parameter in the poverty line

groups, changes in the price index of wage-goods, changes in the relative prices of
wage-goods due to productivity changes in the latter etc.
Sen’s view is that the causes of poverty in India are illiteracy, poor health care,
unemployment, bureaucratic administration etc. An illiterate person can hardly engage
himself in production or in service. He is unaware of modern means of livelihood. Sen
has suggested removal of illiteracy, malnutrition, unemployment etc. within a specific
time period.

He found that unequal distribution of wealth and income or concentration of wealth in

fewer hands, illiteracy were the causes of poverty in countries like India. In Indian
system, women members of a family are deprived of sufficient food, medical facilities
etc. From the records of deaths during the period of famine, he found that among the
victims, the number of women surpassed the male counter parts. Old women and
female children died in larger numbers.

Awards And Accolades

Adam Smith Prize by Cambridge Universtiy (1954)
Stevensen Prize by Cambridge University (1956)
Mahalanobis Prize (1976)
Rank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy (1986)
Senator Giovanni Agnelli International Prize in Ethics (1990)
Alan Shawn Feinsteen World Hunger' Award (1990)
Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award (1993)
Indira Gandhi Gold Medal Award of the Asiatic Society (1994)
Edinburgh Medal (1997)
9th Catalonia International Prize (1997)
Nobel Prize in Economics (1998)
Bharat Ratna Award (1999)
Honorary citizenship from the Bangladesh Government (1999)
Leontef Prize from the Global Development and Environment Institute(2000)
Eisenhower Medal for Leadership and Service USA (2000)
Companion of Honor (2000)
The International Humanist Award from the International Humanist and Ethical Union
(2002)
The Indian Chamber of Commerce conferred up on him the Lifetime Achievement Award
(2003)
Lifetime Achievement Award from the UNESCAP

By :
Mayank Hedau -81
Samarth Auradkar -97