AMARTYA SEN, INDIAN ECONOMIST, NOBEL PRIZE WINNER

Amartya Sen""1Amartya Kumar Sen, an Indian economist and a winner of the Nobel Prize was born on 3rd November 1933 in Santiniketan, Westbengal. Santiniketan the University town established by the poet Rabindranath Tagore, another Indian Nobel Prize winner. His ancestral home was in Wari, Dhaka in modern-day Bangladesh. His family migrated to India following partition in 1947. Rabindranath Tagore is said to have given Amartya Sen his name "Amartya" meaning "immortal". Sen`s maternal grandfather Ksitimohan Sen was a renowned scholar of medieval Indian literature. Amartya Sen was born to professor father Ashutosh Sen, who taught Chemistry at Dhaka University and mother Amita Sen. Indian writer and scholar Nabaneeta Dev Sen was his first wife with whom he had two children Antara and Nandana. Antara is renowend Indian journalist and Nandana is a bollywood actress. But their marriage broke up after they moved to London in 1971. Eva Colorni was his second wife with whom he had two children, Indrani and Kabir. Indrani is a journalist in New York and Kabir teaches P.E in the Boston area. Eva died from stomach cancer in 1985. An economic historian, an expert on Adam smith and Fellow of King`s College, Cambridge The Hon. Emma Georgina Rothschild is his present wife. St Gregory`s School in Dhaka in modern-day Bangladesh was Amartya Sen`s high-school. Before moving to Trinity College, Cambridge Sen studied in India at the school system of Visva-Bharati University and Presidency College, Kolkata, where he earned a First Class BA in 1953. At Trinity College he received B.A in 1956 and then a Ph.D. in 1959. He was also allowed four years to immerse himself in philosophical issues during his stay at Trinity College.

He has taught economics at University of Calcutta, Jadavpur University, Delhi, Oxford where he was first a Professor of Economics at Nuffield College and then the Drummond Professor of Political Economy and a Fellow of All Souls College, London School of Economics, Harvard and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1998 to 2004. In January 2004 Sen returned to Harvard. He is also a contributor to the Eva Colorni Trust at the former London Guildhall University.

Amartya Sen in 1998 for his work on famine, human development theory, welfare economics, the underlying mechanisms of poverty and political liberalism won the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences i.e. Nobel Prize for Economics. He became the first Asian academic to head an Oxbridge college. Among his many contributions to development economics, Sen has produced work on gender inequality. He is currently the Lamont University Professor at Harvard University. Amartya Sen`s books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He is a trustee of the Economists for Peace and Security.

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