Abhijit Sen, an economist and former Planning Commission member who was one of the country’s best specialists on rural economics, died on Monday night. He was 72. “Around 11 p.m., he had a heart attack. We hurried him to the hospital, but by the time we arrived, it was too late “His brother, Dr. Pronab Sen, agreed.
Abhijit Sen taught economics at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University for more than four decades and held various prominent government roles, including chair of the Commission of Agricultural Cost and Prices. He served on the Planning Commission from 2004 to 2014, during Manmohan Singh’s tenure as Prime Minister.
Sen taught economics for four decades at Sussex, Oxford, Cambridge, and Essex before joining Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Centre for Economic Studies and Planning in 1985. There, he worked with economists such as Krishna Bharadwaj, Prabhat Pattnaik, C.P. Chandrashekhar, Amit Bhaduri, and his wife Jayati Ghosh to establish the department as a prominent centre for development economics and the study of the Indian economy.
Sen’s contributions to policy were not limited to his teaching and research. In 1997, he was named head of the Commission on Agricultural Costs and Prices, a ministry of agriculture group responsible with setting minimum support prices for a variety of farm commodities. When his tenure expired three years later, the National Democratic Alliance administration requested him to chair the High-Level Committee of Experts on Long-Term Grain Policy. Among the committee’s suggestions was the establishment of a universal public distribution system (PDS) for rice and wheat for all Indian consumers, as well as the establishment of the CACP as an authorized, statutory entity.
He was appointed to the Planning Commission, then the main policy-making body on national economic concerns, for a five-year term in 2004, and reappointed in 2009. There, he continued to advocate for universal PDS and remunerative rates for farmers, despite the fact that this ran against to the official policy of the Manmohan Singh government. He also addressed the issue of commodities futures trading in India. The Niti Aayog was established in 2014 by the Narendra Modi government in place of the Planning Commission.
Sen, who was born on November 18, 1950, in Jamshedpur, attended the Sardar Patel Vidyalaya in Delhi before studying Physics at St Stephen’s College at Delhi University. Sen obtained his Ph.D. in economics from Cambridge under the supervision of Suzy Paine for his thesis, ‘The agricultural limitation to economic development: The case of India.’
Sen’s assistance was often sought by the UNDP, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, and the Asian Development Bank, in addition to his work with the CACP and Planning Commission.
He received the Padma Bhushan for public service in 2010. His wife, the economist Jayati Ghosh, and daughter, Jahnavi Sen, the deputy editor of The Wire, survive him. At 5 p.m., the cremation will take place at Green Park Crematorium.
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