Sen, Amartya (1933–)

AMARTYA SEN, THE world-renowned authority on welfare economics and Nobel laureate, was born in Santiniketan, India. Ashutosh Sen, his father, used to teach chemistry at Dhaka University, Bangladesh. Like his mother, Amita, Sen studied in Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Afterward, he was educated at Presidency College, Kolkata (Calcutta), and Trinity College in Cambridge, the United Kingdom. Sen became the chairperson of the Economics Department of Jadavpur University, Kolkata at the age of 23. He was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Cambridge in 1959. His teaching career spanned the universities of the globe: Kolkata, Delhi, Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard. Sen did research on various aspects of economics and was very much interested in philosophy; he wrote on epistemology, political philosophy, and ethics.

Sen became the first Indian to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics, instituted by the Sveriges Riksbank (Bank of Sweden), for his contribution to welfare economics. The citation of October 14, 1998, mentioned that Sen's study of the welfare of the poorest people in society had broadened knowledge about the underlying factors behind famines. With methodologies from both economics and philosophy, he had given an ethical touch in analyzing economic problems.

The president of India awarded him the highest honor of the nation, the Bharat Ratna. He also received the Frank E. Seidman Award in Political Economy, Senator Giovanni Agnelli International prize in ethics, Edinburgh Medal, Presidency of the Italian Republic Medal, Eisenhower Medal, Honorary Companion of Honor of Great Britain, Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Award, and Brazilian Ordem do Merito Cientifico. He was professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University until 1998, and then became the master of Trinity College, Cambridge, United Kingdom. But he did not cut his connections with Harvard.

Sen studied different dimensions of poverty, going beyond the mathematical theories and approaching it with a social vision. Poverty, for an individual, was not living beyond an imaginary poverty line with a specified income per day. It meant deprivation from certain basic elements like education, healthcare, land, justice, and resources. It meant that the individual's earnings were not sufficient for meeting the basic requirements of life.

According to Sen, poverty should be measured by taking into account the things that a person can get through earnings, rather than calculating by income level. It had wide variance depending on the particular individual and the place to which he belonged. In rich countries like the United States, there are many poor people who do not have access to education and health services.

In “Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation,” Sen challenges the traditional view that the cause of famine is a shortage of food. The devastating Bengal famine of 1943, where about two to three million people perished, left a deep imprint on Sen's mind as a student in Santiniketan. After studying the Bengal Famine of 1943, the 1973–75 famines of Ethiopia, famines in the Sahel area of Africa in the early 1970s, and the 1974 famine of Bangladesh, Sen found that social and economic factors were responsible for the opportunities of different classes in a society.

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