Times Of India
Thursday 15 October 1998

Calcutta's pride knows no bounds
By Shikha Mukerjee

The Times of India News Service

CALCUTTA: As news of Amartya Sen receiving the Nobel Prize for economics spread through the city, there was jubilation, not because he is an Indian but because he is a Bengali. ``After Rabindranath Tagore, another Bengali has received the Nobel prize. Mother Teresa too was from Calcutta, but she was not a Bengali,'' said a proud local resident.

Calcutta is bound to give Professor Sen a hero's welcome when he arrives here in December to address an international seminar on decentralised planning. The seminar is being organised by the West Bengal state planning board.

On Wednesday, people changed their plans for the evening in order to get together and share the pride of being Bengalis. Calcutta is counting the Nobel laureates it has helped to produce and the tally is getting impressive. Beginning with Rabindranath Tagore, on to C.V. Raman who worked at the Indian Institute for the Cultivation of Science in Calcutta and, of course, Mother Teresa. An earlier winner, Ronald Ross had also carried out his pioneering work on malaria here.
In a tribute to an old friend, economist Dipak Banerjee and feminist academic Nirmala Banerjee said they were happy that for the first time a close friend had won the Nobel prize. However, they added that because of his eminence, he did not come to Calcutta ``all that often, any longer''.

Pointing out that the Nobel prize was long overdue, Mr Banerjee said Prof Sen's heyday was from the 1960s to the 1980s when he worked on development economics. During that period he had completely dominated the field.

Ms Banerjee said Prof Sen had taken up issues like gender which had changed the outlook of even policy planners. It had affected the way the UN, the UNDP and the World Bank looked at development in relation to gender. His argument was that the family did not operate as a homogeneous unit and that women lost out whenever there was a conflict or when someone within the family grew stronger.

State home minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya welcomed the news and said the honour was long overdue. As Bengalis and Indians, ``we offer our respectful congratulations'' to Prof Sen, he added.

State finance minister Asim Dasgupta said Prof Sen had remained ``uncompromisingly focused on the problems of development and welfare''. Mr Dasgupta added that Prof Sen had remained interested in the decentralisation that West Bengal had attempted through the panchayat system.

Bikash Sinha, director of the Bhaba Atomic Research Centre here, said ``Rabindranath Tagore, C.V. Raman and Mother Teresa did all their work in Calcutta for which to be recognised internationally is far more difficult. Some people seem to benefit from the misery of others.''
Film-maker Mrinal Sen said, ``I feel enormously proud being a Calcuttan and an Indian. I know that he has got the prize for his work on poverty and hunger. I do remember having read the occasional article written by him and whatever little I did understand, left me deeply impressed.''