Understandable. Sen, after all, is said to be the purveyor of poverty. The Big Apple is all about wealth. The first thing everyone noticed about this year's Prize was how sharply it contrasted with last year's winners who were cited for their work on valuing risky ``derivatives'' investments such as stock options and have since found themselves in the doghouse.

But in the field of pure economics, in a year when economic fundamentals are being called into question, the Nobel Prize for Sen drew rave reviews and encomiums. Sen is not only the first Indian or Asian to win the prize since its inception, but also the first welfare economist to be cited in recent times when finance and gain theories haveruled the roost.

Isn't it ironical? Last year the Prize went to high finance which has since taken a steep dive, 1971 Nobel Laureaute Prof Paul Samuelson, Sen's friend and peer at Harvard told The Indian Express. The Nobel Committee has shown that human welfare is an important goal of modern mainstream economics.

Indeed many economists see the Prize for Sen as a vindication of the increasing doubts in the field about unbridled market economy. For years, Sen has had a reputation as a leftist economist who has often harped on the importance of government intervention in poverty alleviation. But economists say he was frequently misunderstood.

People miscast him as anti-reform. He wasn't against reform. He actually endorsed Manmohan Singh's reforms, says Kaushik Basu, a World Bank economist who got his Ph.D under Sen at the Delhi School of Economics. Adds Samuelson: As economics is moving today towards the selfish right, Sen is a leftist.

And I don't mean it at all in the pejorative sense. But evenamong peers to Sen's far right, there was joy unbounded.

``I'm delighted. Its a great moment for India, exulted Prof Jagdish Bhagwati, Columbia University economist and himself a perennial favourite for the Prize. The Nobel Committee is returning to the underappreciated area of welfare economics after many years.

Sen was often tipped for the Prize. In fact, he was a strong contender last year and his name cropped up often at economic seminars and on internet discussion sites. It's hardly a surprise. It was not a matter of if, but when, said Barbara Solow, wife of Robert Solow, Sen's colleague and contemporary at Harvard who won the Prize in 1987 for his contributions to the theory of economic growth.

Sen's candidature for the prize has been mentioned for so long and so often that the announcement this year did not really come as a surprise, says Basu. In one particularly prescient posting, Delhi writer Sukumaran Muralidharan wrote in an Internet chat forum last year: In the spirit of fancifulspeculation and wishful thinking that seems quite the mood of the moment... let me propose the following two for the Nobel Prize in Economics: (1) Amartya Sen, Lamont University Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University, for formulating in elegant prose and mathematics that would challenge the ingenuity of the smartest sophomore, what till recently used to be literally a grandma's tale: that famines occur on account of purchasing power deficiencies rather than supply shortfalls.

Muralidharan's other choice? Jagdish Bhagwati. Sen's award also created a stir in the World Bank which at the annual Bretton Woods Institution meeting earlier this month took on the IMF and the United States over how to meet the global economic crisis and stressed the need for more humane governance, Sen's line for long. Bank Presdent James Wolfensohn is known to be a good friend of Sen and last year Sen gave an address at the Bank.

However, economist discount the theory that awarding the Nobel to Sen means theSwedish Foundation is passing a judgment against reforms. The prize, they say, is for Sen's scientific work, not policy judgment. The fact that the Nobel Prize for Lieterature this year went to a Portuguese communist does not mean the Nobel foundation endorses communism, says Samuelson.

But at the same time, experts also noted that Sen was the first economist from a developing country to win the Prize. In fact, in the three decades since its inception - it is the most recent Nobel Prize instituted - no one outside the United States and Europe has won it. The two most recent and prominent welfare economists to win it are the Swede Gunnar Myrdal and Stanfords Kenneth Arrow.