Which meant that from November to February you walked or cycled to his classes in the dark, shivering out of your limbs the cold that crept upon you in dark, centuries-old rooms that at that time (now things are different) knew no central heating. Most 9 o'clock lecturers, therefore, found themselves addressing half-empty classrooms, their students, sensibly, sleeping off the previous evening's drinking under a mound of snug blankets.

But even then, when he was all of 28 years old, Amartya Sen's classes were invariably full. It was not his razor-sharp mind (for Cambridge was full of razor-sharp minds) but his crystal clear articulation, like a wind piercing through the winter fog, that made him the most popular lecturer on the circuit. He taught his students; most others mumbled tothemselves.

He and his wife, Nabanita (alas, no longer together), kept open house in a dinky little flat on Trinity Street. To get there, you clambered up a winding staircase, ``On the second turning/Of the second stair...'', I once recited as Amartya opened the door. We spent more time discussing T.S. Eliot than dry economics. ``Now that lilacs are in bloom/She keeps a bowl of lilacs in her room/And twists one in her figures as she talks.'' Amartya always wondered what I found in that line.

The youthful Amartya of my youth in now a Nobel Laureate. It was written into his very first publication, The Choice of Techniques, an earlier version of which had won him the undergraduate Adam Smith prize at Trinity (of which he is now Master), a devastating critique of the flawed rationale of khadi. It is strange that the word ``technology'' had not yet entered the general vocabulary: ``techniques'' was still the vogue word.

But The Choice of Techniques was not the first book to bear Amartya's name. There was anearlier publication, on Hinduism, by his grandfather, Kshiti Mohan Sen, which acknowledges schoolboy Amartya's help in putting the book together. The connection Amartya Sen has made between economics and philosophy goes back to those early beginnings.

He was reared as a Renaissance Man in a Santiniketan which still bore the impress of Gurudev. One tribute we could pay simultaneously to Amartya Sen and Rabindranath Ta-gore would be to rescue Viswa-Bharati from the abyss of a second-class provincial university into which it has tragically fallen.

But the larger tribute would be to celebrate India's first Nobel Prize in Economics with the adoption of the priorities Amartya Sen has been urging. The first of these is our proudest achievement: democracy. We are among the very few countries which have emerged from thralldom in the last 50 years to have translated independence for the country into freedom for her people.

China certainly can make no such claim. Which is why, as Sen has stressed, they have hadfamines and we have not. And which is also why the ``Asian miracle'' has been a bubble so quickly pricked; transparency and accountability not Asian-style authoritarianisms, are the necessary prerequisites for sustaining markets.

If, however, it is democracy that is responsible for keeping India from economic disaster, equally it is the inadequacy of grassroots democracy that is responsible for the three most damaging failures of independent India identified by Amartya Sen: elementary education, primary health and gender equality.

Amartya Sen, himself, in a lecture in Delhi a few years ago, drew attention to the curious paradox that whereas India produced six times as many graduates as China, there were six times fewer children in primary schools in the country. To my mind, the obvious explanation is that higher education has been a central government responsibility, subject to the pressures of Parliament, while elementary education has been a state government responsibility, inured by the absence ofpanchayati raj from the pressures of grassroots democracy. Not only has the state funding of elementary education been hopelessly inadequate, it is not teaching but the transfer of teachers that has become the single biggest racket in our state-level politics, worse even than the transfer of PWD engineers.

Now that elected panchayats are in place everywhere (except, of course, in that Republic of Darkness, benighted Bihar) the mechanism is at hand for establishing a nexus between community control and the education of the community. Decentralisation of elementary education to the village panchayat, including the recruitment, disciplining and dismissal of teaching staff, combined with the devolution of funds for elementary education to the village level, would constitute the true beginnings of an overnight revolution in the weakest segment of our nation-building.

Central funds for elementary education, which must be raised exponentially to reach the goal of earmarking 6 per cent of GDP for education in theNinth Plan, must be directly channeled to the bank accounts of the panchayats (as was done with the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana when it was launched in 1989). A National Mid-day Meal Scheme (patterned on the Tamil Nadu model of cooked food, not grain to be flogged by education department officials on the market) is an essential complement. By attaching a kitchen to every school, Tamil Nadu literacy rates have soared in under a generation from UP levels to Kerala levels. And, unsurprisingly, birth rates have plummeted from cow-belt heights to Scandinavian ratios. Inevitably, gender equality in the younger generation has surged beyond the wildest hopes of not only the grandmothers of today but even mothers.

A pledge and a practical package to achieve universal elementary education within the life of the Ninth Plan is the only sincere tribute we can pay India's latest Nobel Laureate. When Parliament convenes on November 30, that should be its first item of business. The rest would be empty words.