Calcutta Online: 15th October, 1998
The Third World Apologist finally strikes - Sankar Ray

October 14: Down the memory lane, one recalls the days of high-voltage revolutionism of the late 1960s when thousands of youth were aflame with the refulgent Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR), coming from the brainwaves of Mao Zedong. Prof Joan Robinson, mentor of Prof Amartya Sen, was speaking before teachers, students and researchers pertaining to the discipline of economics, at the Delhi School of Economics. The Cambridge academician with Mao's Red Book, firmly clasped, kept her audience in rapt attention. Her favourite pupil asked a question only to be rebuffed by his teacher, obviously with affection.

Prof Robinson, already wellknown for her characterisation of monopoly as a phenomenon of "imperfect competition", had never been a Marxist economist. She was a neo-Keynesist who considered Marx's Theory of Surplus Value as "metaphysical". Nonetheless, she had been a leftist and radical economist and she was very logically attracted by the anti-establishmentarian essence of GPCR. Prof Sen had been a sympathiser of the left when he was a student, doing his economics honours, at the Presidency College, with the heydays of All India Student Federation. The collaboration between the tutor and pupil at the Cambridge became effective and the first seminal work, Choice of Techniques, of Prof Sen was the outcome. The theme of appropriate technology was dished out as an original contribution.

Seventyfour-year-old Prof Amlan Dutta, a high-profile teacher of economics at the University of Calcutta during the formative days of Prof Sen and his close friend, the late Prof Sukhamay Chakraborty, another talented economist and a pupil of Jan Tinbergen, among the first Nobel Laureates in economics at the North Holland School of Economics, recalls that "Amartya was never a direct student of mine as I taught at the department of economics at the University of Calcutta and not at the Presidency College. But I have found his forty years of incisive investigation and research in economics as unique and path-breaking. Starting off with the rather highly-technical theme of Choice of Techniques, Amartya had spread out into a vast and versatile area, first moving on to welfare economics. But his most remarkable achievement has for last years been on the causes and trends of famines in the Third World countries. Among his findings is the role of the media in combating famines. He studied famines in Bangladesh and sub-Saharan countries and set a new school of thinking. As you know, the Bengal Famine of 1943 was a man-made one. Amartya inferred that famines could be checkmated and even prevented if a free media were active. Had there been a free and active media in Bengal in the 1940s, the man-made famine could be averted. After 1947, we have a free media and we did not have any major famine in India. Amartya rightly points this out".

The gender discrimination in causing abject penury, at times leading to famine, is another landmark in Dr Sen's works. We have seen that women and children are the initial and worst victims of natural and ecological disasters. Similarly, the question of entitlement of human beings in insulation of economically weaker section of multi-structural societies is a unique contribution of the latest addition to the list of Nobel laureates in economic sciences.
Dr Sen's recognition inspires a modest student of economics to seek other roots of impoverishment. Dadabhai Naoroji's seminal volume on Indian poverty, identified as "un-British rule" set the pace. Poverty as a theme of a new school of behavioral and welfare economics found a new language in Asian Drama and Challenge of World Poverty of Dr Gunnar Myrdal, another Nobel laureate in economics. But one should also remember the outstanding contribution of Latin American Marxist economist, the late Raul Prebisch whom the Swedish authorities did not consider for the prize. Dr Sen started with more theoretical side of economics but won over the Swedish authorities with the calisthenics of applied economics. For many who rejoice over the investiture, Dr Sen ought to have broken newer grounds in theoretical economics.