A Nobel for Development Studies

Imagine the atmosphere, 1950s Calcutta, a small café just outside the Presidency College, endless cups of tea are needed to moisten mouths dried out by chains of cigarettes and the strain of interminable debate. The topics under discussion would be eclectic; Politics, Marxism, Philosophy and of course Economics. Imagine the conversation on one particular table, seating perhaps Bimal Jalan, Sukhamoy Chakravarty and Amartya Sen.

Forty years on, much has changed. The great economists of the 50s and 60s are sidelined, occasionally even reviled. Camps have developed with deep fissures. Columbia Professor Jagdish Bhagwati and Srinivasan team up against K.N. Raj and Chakraborty. Arjun Sengupta against the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India Bimal Jalan. They all have something to say about Manmohan Singh. The trouble with economists today seems that there are too many of them, most are trying to distance themselves from the economics of the left, once championed by Presidency, Calcutta and JNU Delhi their alma maters, and none can agree with the other.

In this context the following announcement gains vast significance:

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 1998 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Professor Amartya Sen, Trinity College, Cambridge, U.K. (citizen of India) for his contributions to welfare economics.

Professor Sen's work on poverty and welfare indices marked a very significant shift in the paradigm for development assessment. On the economics of famine his famous conclusion that famines have little to do with the lack of food was startling, as were his studies on comparing the quality of life in Kerala and Bengal to the inner cities in the developed world. Throughout his career, his emphasis has been on trying to get past both the models of centrally planed economies and market capitalism, and towards a more human face to economics.

Amartya Sen's stand against unbridled capitalism earned him accolades in the sixties and seventies and scorn in the late eighties and early nineties. The failure of socialism (which he never championed in the classical sense) seemed to mark him out as just another of the talking brigade of Indian Economists. It remains to be seen if his Indian colleagues will be more accommodating of him now. A Nobel has been known to do wonderful things ...