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He is the conscience-keeper of the economics profession. That was how Nobel laureate Robert Solow described Amartya Sen. The observation captures the unique genius of an economist who has made it a habit to look beyond his discipline. Sen, in fact, has a well-known contempt for the narrow view of economics. As he once wrote dismissively, ``Some of modern economics seems indeed to be based on the corset-maker's old advice: `If madam is entirely comfortable in it, then madam most certainly needs a smaller size.'' Unlike many of his compeers, who got to know more and more about less and less, Sen's economic vision is intrinsically bound up with his social vision, which in turn enshrines three basic dimensions: Development, Freedom, Opportunities.
This was not the first time that Sen's name surfaced as an important contender for the honour that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences finally bestowed upon him on Wednesday. By so doing, it signalled the mood of the times. By recognising Sen's brand of welfareeconomics, it also recognised the limits of neo-liberal economics in the age of globalisation.
Sen is certainly not against economic reform. But as he stated, time and again, especially with regard to India's attempt at liberalisation from 1991 onward, reform without simultaneously effecting radical changes in social policy, including those governing basic education, ownership patterns, elementary health care and the status of women, could be a self-defeating exercise.
In other words, he sees economic development in terms of expansion of opportunities that the individual in society enjoys. It follows from this that for Sen it is not `whether equality', but `what equality'; not `more' or `less' government, but the type of governance, that is central. These postulates, that led him in time to refine new and more complete indices of poverty, were shaped in the anvil of his early studies in famine. Disasters of this kind, whether they strike Bangladesh or Sahel, occur not because of shortages of food, butbecause of a shortfall in governance, among other factors.
In many ways, this Harvard don and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, is a citizen of the world, yet he was never tempted to relinquish his Indian passport. His engagement with this country is not necessarily confined to his particular discipline. His public stand on issues like the demolition of the Babri Masjid or the nuclear blasts of Pokharan-II could certainly not have endeared him to the Indian political establishment, but this was never an impeding factor.
The ties with home were deep and profound, beginning with the formative years spent at Calcutta's Presidency College to an eight-year stint as a professor in the Delhi School of Economics. The imprint of friendships with the great economists of the '60s and '70s, men like Sukhamoy Chakravarty and K.N. Raj, were decisive. India, in fact, proved to be more than just a location for Sen. It was a laboratory, a great sounding board on which to test some of his greatest ideas. Itsheterogeneous character and wide disparities, both intrigues and excites him. It is therefore entirely fitting that Sen becomes the first Indian to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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