AMARTYA SEN INDIAN ECONOMIST LIFE STORY : –
Born : – 3 November 1933, Shanti Niketan, Kolkata
For his work : – Economist, Professor
Educational Institutions : – Presidency College Kolkata, Trinity College Cambridge
Awards : – Bharat Ratna, Nobel Prize
Amartya Sen is an Indian economist and philosopher. In 1998, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his works in the Arthasastra. In 1999, he was also awarded the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian honor. Professor Amartya Sen has been teaching in the United Kingdom and the United States since the 1970s. In 2015, the Royal Academy of Britain gave him the first ‘Charleston-IFG’. John Maynard Keynes Award ‘.
He is currently Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. He has also been the Vice Chancellor of Nalanda University. He has also been a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, a Distinguished at All Souls College Oxford, an Honorary Fellow at Darwin College Cambridge and a Fellow at Trinity College. Apart from this, Amartya Sen was also Master of Trinity College from 1998 to 2004.
Early Life : –
Amartya Sen was born on 3 November 1933 in Shantiniketan, Kolkata, into a Bengali family. His father’s name was Ashutosh Sen and mother’s name was Amita Sen. Amartya was christened by Guru Ravindra Nath Tagore. Sen’s family was related to Wari and Manikganj (now in Bangladesh). Amartya’s father Ashutosh Sen was a professor of chemistry at Dhaka University and moved to West Bengal with the family in 1945 and served in the West Bengal Public Service Commission (Chairman) and then the Union Public Service Commission. Amartya’s mother was the daughter of Kshiti Mohan Sen, a well-known scholar of ancient and medieval India and also close to Rabindranath Tagore.
Amartya’s early education began in 1940 at St. Gregory’s School in Dhaka. Since 1941, he studied at Vishwa Bharati University School. They are Came first in the exam and then enrolled in the Presidency College, Kolkata. From there, he earned his BA in Economics and Mathematics. And passed the examination in 1953 to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he completed his BA in Economics. And did the first in his class. Amartya Sen was also elected President of Cambridge Majlis. While in Cambridge he holds a Ph.D. At the same time, he got a proposal from the newly established Jadavpur University to become Professor and Head of Department of Economics. He worked here from 1956-58. Meanwhile, Sen received a prestigious fellowship from Trinity College which gave him the freedom to do anything for the next four years, after which Amartya decided to study philosophy.
Research work : –
In the 1960s and 1970s Amartya Sen promoted the theory of ‘Social Choice’ through his research papers. The American economist Kenneth Arrow identified this principle through his works. In 1981, he published his famous book ‘Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation’. Through this book, he explained that famine is not just due to lack of food but also due to inequality in distribution of food grains. He argued that the Bengal famine of 1943 was caused by unpredictable urban development (which raised commodity prices). Due to this, lakhs of rural laborers fell victim to hunger due to huge inequality in their wages and prices of goods.
Apart from his important work on the causes of famine, Amartya Sen’s work in the field of ‘Development Economics’ had a special effect in the rendering of the ‘Human Development Report’ of the ‘United Nations Development Program’. The ‘Human Development Report’ of the ‘United Nations Development Program’ is an annual report which ranks the countries of the world based on a variety of social and economic indicators. Amartya Sen’s most important and revolutionary contribution to development economics and social indicators is the principle of ‘Capability’, which he proposed in his article ‘Equality of What’.
Through his articles and research, Amartya Sen developed such methods of measuring poverty through which useful information was generated to improve the economic condition of the poor. For example, his theory on inequality explained why India and China have more men than women, while in Western and other poor countries, women outnumber men and have lower mortality. is. According to Sen, in countries like India and China, the number of women is less because boys are provided with better treatment than girls and feticide on the basis of gender.
According to Sen, economic development is not possible without improvement in education and public medical facilities. In 2009, Amartya Sen published a book called ‘The Idea of Justice’ by which he formulated his ‘principle of justice’.
Professional Career : –
Amartya Sen started his academic career as a teacher and research student at Jadavpur University. During 1960–61, he was a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States where he was introduced to Paul Samuelson, Robert Solove, Franco Modigliani and Robert Weiner. He was also a visiting professor at U-C Berkeley and Cornell. Between 1963 and 1971, he taught at the Delhi School of Economics. During this time he was also associated with prestigious Indian educational institutions like Jawaharlal Nehru University, Indian Statistical Institute, Center for Development Studies, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics and Center for Studies in Social Sciences. Meanwhile, scholars like Manmohan Singh, KN Raj and Jagdish Bhagwati were also teaching in the Delhi School of Economics. In 1972, he moved to London School of Economics and stayed there till 1977 and between 1977-86 he attended Oxford University. He moved to Harvard in 1987 and was made Master of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1998.
Nalanda University : –
In 2007, he was made the chairman of ‘Nalanda Mentor Group’. Its purpose was to restore this learning center located in ancient times. Sen was made vice-chancellor of this university in 2012 and the academic program started in the university in August 2014 but in February 2015 Amartya Sen withdrew his name for a second term.
Personal Life : –
Amartya Sen married three times in his life. His first wife was Nabanita Dev Sen (from whom he had two daughters – Antara and Nandana), and their marriage broke up around 1971. After this, Amartya Sen married Italian economist Eva Kolorni in 1978, but Eva died in 1985 due to cancer. In 1991, he married Emma Georgina Rothschilds.
Amartya Sen is an atheist in his personal life.
Awards And Honors : –
Adam Smith Prize, 1954
Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1981
Honorary Fellowship by the Institute of Social Sciences, 1984
Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, 1998
Bharat Ratna, 1999
Honorary Nationality of Bangladesh, 1999
Order of Companion of Honor, UK 2000
Leontief Prize, 2000
Eisenhower Model for Leadership and Service, 2000
351st SP Harvard, 2001
Lifetime Achievement Award, 2004 by Indian Chambers of Commeres
Honorary Degree by University of Pavia, 2005
National Humanities Medal, 2011
Order of the Aztec Eagle, 2012
Commander of the French Legion of Honor, 2013
A.D.T.V. ’25 Greatest Global Living Legends in India’, 2014
Charleston-IFG John Maynard Keynes Award ‘, 2015
