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Bharat Ratna Mr Amartya Sen was born in November 3, 1933 in a Bengoli Brahmin family in Bengal (Now Bangladesh). His house was known as ‘Pratichi at Santiniketan. The name ‘Amrtya Sen’ (means immortal) was given by the great poet Mr Rabindranath Tagore. He was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998. He contributed to the society by giving a “welfare economics and social choice theory.” He was much interested in studying poverty and solving the problems of the poorest people of the society. He was famous for his work on the causes of famine. Due to his observation and findings for the route cause for poverty, the society as well as the government developed the practical solutions for preventing or limiting the effects of shortages of food.
His parents were belonging from present Bangladesh, that time it was a part of British India. Mr Amartya Sen was also belonging to an elite family like Novel Laureate Venky Ramakrishnan, as his father Late Mr Ashutosh Sen was a Professor of Chemistry at Dhaka University, who later was serving the British India government as development commissioner in Delhi. He later became chairman of the West Bengal Public Service Commission. His mother Late Smt Amita Sen was daughter of a close associate of the great poet Ravindranath Tagore. Mr Sen formal study started in 1940 at St Gregory’s School in Dhaka. Later he came to Shantiniketan where he completed his school education.
During his school education he focused more on progressive study and cultural diversity adopting from across the world and his school environment helped him a lot in this regard. He also studied in Presidency College, Calcutta, and obtained a degree of B.A. in Economics with distinction (First in First) in 1951. During his college study, he was diagnosed oral cancer but his courage beat the disease with radiation treatment despite having a rare chance of recovery. In 1953 he went to Cambridge University and obtained another degree of B.A. in Economics in 1955, again with distinction and topped in the rank. During his study in Cambridge University, he was officially offered PhD and became Professor and the youngest Head of the Department at newly created Department of Economics at Jadavpur University in Calcutta after completing his research in 1955–56.
He has written numerous books that impressed the society include: Development as Freedom in 1999; Rationality and Freedom in 2002 – a discussion of social choice theory; The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture, and Identity in 2005; AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories from India in 2008, a collection of essays on the AIDS crisis in India; and The Idea of Justice in 2009, a critique of existing theories of social justice. Philosophy is also one of them which interest him most. He was much interested in it as he found it very rewarding.
During his study he was elected to a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College, which gave him freedom to do anything he liked in this stream for four years. His interest in philosophy was from his tenure in Presidency College and he got inspired towards it from a book “Social Choice and Individual Values” written by Kenneth Arrow. He says, “Studying philosophy was important for me because my areas of interest in economics are closely related to philosophical disciplines.”
His concept of welfare economics finds the ways for the framework for the policy development for the well-being of the community. The work and management skills discussed in his book “Collective Choice and Social Welfare” published in 1970 Mr Amartya Sen has given a method of measuring poverty. In the book useful information has been shared for improving economic conditions of poor and downtrodden. He once concluded that his interest in famine developed with his personal experience as when he was a nine-year-old he had witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, in which three million people have died.
According to him there was sufficient food supply in India but the miss management of distribution dead to the devastation because rural laborer lost their job resulting to inability to purchase the food. The same has been discussed in his book “Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation” published in 1981, that in many cases of famine, food supplies were adequate but the social and economic factors arises from the situation like low wages, unemployment, rising food prices, and improper management of food-distribution led to starvation.
Mr Amrtya Sen’s views given idea to the governments and international organizations for proper management of handling food crises. It encouraged policy makers to think in this direction and take a balanced approach to facilitate adequate purchasing power to the people who are prone to divulge into that trap where they can loss the capacity to purchase food for survival. For example offering public-works projects and maintaining stable prices for food are imminent in that condition.
To improve the condition he advocated for social reforms such as improvements in education and public health that can re-place the economic reforms. He was saying in democratic society or the government famine does not occur because their leaders definitely remain responsive to the demands of the citizens. Sen was a member of the Encyclopædia Britannica Editorial Board of Advisors from 2005 to 2007. In 2008 with the contribution of Government of India Amartya Sen Fellowship Fund has been established at Harvard University to enable deserving Indian students to study at the institution’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
There are numerous awards, honors and accolades came to his name that includes over 90 honorary degrees received from universities and institutions around the world. In 2019, London School of Economics created Amartya Sen Chair in Inequality Studies. Some of the other prominent achievement in terms of awards and honors include: Adam Smith Prize (1954), Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1981), Honorary fellowship by the Institute of Social Studies (1984), Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (1998), Bharat Ratna (1999); Leontief Prize (2000), Lifetime Achievement Award by the Indian Chamber of Commerce (2004), and many more.
Mr Amartya Sen was also in controversy during first tenure of Modi regime having a leftist bent of observation being critical to Narendra Midi when he became Prime Minister first time in 2014. Later Mr Sen conceded that the PM Modi did give a sense of faith that things can happen. In February 2015, he was again preaches against government when he opted out for second term as chancellor of Nalanda University saying that the government did not want continuing it. He also criticized Government of India on J&K issue when its special status was revoked. He gave his view against the detention of Kashmiri political leaders. Mr Sen spent much of his later life as a political writer and activist. He disagreed with Modi’s ideology but advocates for healthcare reform by the government, because low-income people in India have to deal with exploitative and inadequate private healthcare. At the ground of educational reform he recommended the government to adopt the education policies that Japan opted in 19th century.
