Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen
Sen in 2007
Amartya Sen
Born	Amartya Kumar Sen 3 11, 1933
Birthplace	Santiniketan, Bengal, British India
Nationality	Indian
Occupation	Economist, philosopher
Title	Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, Harvard University
Known for	Welfare economics, social choice theory, capability approach, famine studies
Education	Ph.D., University of Cambridge
Awards	Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (1998), Bharat Ratna (1999), Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (2020)

Amartya Kumar Sen (born 3 November 1933) is an Indian economist and philosopher whose work has shaped the fields of welfare economics, social choice theory, development economics, and the study of famine, poverty, and inequality. Born on the campus of Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, Bengal, in what was then British India, Sen has spent a career spanning more than six decades examining the intersections of economics, philosophy, and public policy. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 for his contributions to welfare economics and received India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1999. Sen currently holds the position of Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University, and previously served as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. His influential writings on famines, gender inequality, human development, and the capabilities approach have informed policy discussions in governments and international organizations worldwide. In recent years, Sen has continued to engage in public discourse on topics including India's economic development, secularism, and models of social welfare.

Early Life

Amartya Kumar Sen was born on 3 November 1933 on the campus of Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, Bengal, British India. In his Nobel biographical essay, Sen noted: "I was born in a University campus and seem to have lived all my life in one campus or another." His family was originally from Dhaka, now the capital of Bangladesh. The name "Amartya," meaning "immortal," was reportedly given to him by Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel laureate poet who had founded Visva-Bharati University, reflecting the close cultural ties between Sen's family and the intellectual milieu of Santiniketan.

Sen grew up during a period of significant upheaval in the Indian subcontinent. His formative years coincided with the Bengal famine of 1943, which killed an estimated three million people. The famine left a deep impression on the young Sen and would later become a central subject of his scholarly work. He witnessed the social dynamics of the famine firsthand — observing how it disproportionately affected certain groups while others remained unaffected — an experience that profoundly influenced his later theoretical work on the causes and prevention of famines.

Sen also witnessed the communal violence that preceded the Partition of India in 1947. These experiences of deprivation, inequality, and social conflict in his early life provided the intellectual impetus for much of his subsequent academic career, driving his interest in questions of justice, poverty, and the distribution of resources.

Education

Sen began his early education at St Gregory's School in Dhaka before moving to Santiniketan, where he attended school at Visva-Bharati University. He completed his undergraduate studies at Presidency College in Kolkata, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics.

Sen subsequently went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in England, where he earned a second undergraduate degree (a B.A.) and then pursued graduate studies. He completed his Ph.D. at Cambridge, with a doctoral dissertation on the choice of techniques in development planning. His time at Cambridge exposed him to a wide range of intellectual influences, from the tradition of analytical philosophy to the legacy of John Maynard Keynes and the broader Cambridge school of economics. This interdisciplinary training — combining economics with philosophy and mathematics — would become a hallmark of Sen's scholarly approach throughout his career.

Career

Early Academic Career

Sen began his academic career at a remarkably young age. After completing his studies at Cambridge, he returned to India and took up a position at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, where he served as a professor and head of the economics department while still in his twenties. He subsequently held positions at several Indian institutions, contributing to the emerging field of development economics and engaging with the practical challenges of economic planning in a newly independent India.

During this period, Sen published early work on aspects of Indian agriculture and economic development. A 1962 article in the Economic and Political Weekly addressed agricultural conditions in India, reflecting his engagement with the empirical realities of the Indian economy.

Work at the London School of Economics, Oxford, and Cambridge

Sen moved to the United Kingdom in the early 1970s, where he held positions at the London School of Economics (LSE) and later at the University of Oxford. At Oxford, he served as the Drummond Professor of Political Economy and was a Fellow of All Souls College. His time in Oxford was particularly productive, and it was during this period that he developed many of his most influential theoretical contributions.

In 1998, the University of Oxford conferred recognition on Sen for his academic contributions.

From 1998 to 2004, Sen served as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, the college where he had earned his own degrees. This made him one of the most prominent figures ever to lead the historic college, and he was the first Asian to head an Oxbridge college.

Harvard University

Sen joined the faculty of Harvard University, where he has held appointments in both the Department of Economics and the Department of Philosophy. He currently holds the title of Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard, one of the university's most distinguished endowed chairs. His dual appointment reflects his unique position as a scholar who works across the boundaries of economics and philosophy, bringing rigorous analytical tools from both disciplines to bear on questions of justice, welfare, and human development.

Contributions to Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory

Sen's contributions to welfare economics are among his most celebrated. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to him in 1998 specifically for his work in this field. His research demonstrated fundamental limitations and possibilities in the aggregation of individual preferences into collective decisions, building upon and extending the work of Kenneth Arrow on social choice.

One of Sen's most significant theoretical contributions is the formulation of the capability approach, a framework for evaluating individual well-being and social arrangements. Rather than measuring welfare purely in terms of income, utility, or resources, the capability approach focuses on individuals' real freedoms — their capabilities to achieve various "functionings" (states of being and doing) that they have reason to value. This approach has had far-reaching influence on development policy and on the measurement of human progress, most notably through its impact on the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Index (HDI).

Sen's work on social choice theory also addressed the so-called "liberal paradox," demonstrating that it is impossible to have a social decision-making process that is simultaneously Pareto optimal and respects minimal individual liberty. This result, published in a seminal paper in the Journal of Political Economy in 1970, challenged widely held assumptions about the compatibility of individual rights and social welfare.

Famine and Poverty Research

Sen's work on famines represents one of his most consequential intellectual contributions. Drawing on his childhood experience of the Bengal famine of 1943, he developed the entitlement approach to famine analysis. This framework, articulated in his landmark 1981 book Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, argued that famines are not simply caused by a decline in food availability but rather by failures in the distribution of entitlements — the set of commodity bundles that a person can command in a society using their endowments and exchange possibilities.

Sen demonstrated that famines can occur even when aggregate food supply is adequate, a finding that challenged the prevailing Malthusian explanation of famines as a consequence of food shortage relative to population. His analysis showed that famines often result from economic and political failures rather than from natural causes alone, and that democratic governance and a free press are effective mechanisms for preventing famines — a proposition that became known as the "democracy and famine" thesis.

Sen also contributed significantly to the measurement of poverty. His 1976 paper "Poverty: An Ordinal Approach to Measurement" proposed a new poverty index that addressed limitations of traditional headcount measures by incorporating the depth and distribution of poverty among the poor.

Gender Inequality and "Missing Women"

In a widely cited 1990 essay in The New York Review of Books titled "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing," Sen drew attention to the demographic deficit of women in parts of Asia and North Africa. He argued that this deficit — reflecting excess female mortality due to neglect in healthcare, nutrition, and other basic needs — constituted one of the most pressing moral and social problems of the modern world. This essay and subsequent research stimulated a large body of scholarship on gender discrimination in developing countries and brought international attention to the issue of gender-based disparities in survival and well-being.

Public Intellectual and Commentator on Indian Affairs

Beyond his academic work, Sen has been an active public intellectual, particularly on matters relating to India's economic and social development. He has written extensively on topics including Indian economic reform, secularism, education, and healthcare.

In the Economic and Political Weekly, Sen authored a piece titled "Three Rs of Reform" addressing India's approach to economic liberalization. He has consistently argued that India's economic development strategy must prioritize investments in human capital — particularly education and public health — alongside market-oriented reforms.

In November 2025, Sen visited the London School of Economics to discuss his new collection of cultural essays and reiterated his argument that India cannot become a global economic power with an uneducated and unhealthy workforce. He also engaged with the LSE in a public event conversation about his work Collective Choice and Social Welfare.

In February 2026, Sen praised the Indian state of Kerala as a model of development, noting its transformation into one of the highest-income states in the country. Around the same period, he expressed concerns about what he described as a weakening of secularism in India, warning against what he called the "organised thrusting of smallness."

Nalanda University

Sen served as the first chancellor of Nalanda University, a modern institution established in Bihar, India, inspired by the ancient seat of learning of the same name. He was named to the position as part of an effort to revive the university as a center of international scholarship.

Personal Life

Sen has been married three times. His first marriage was to Nabaneeta Dev Sen, a Bengali writer and academic, in 1958; the marriage ended in divorce in 1976. His second marriage was to Eva Colorni, an Italian economist and daughter of the Italian anti-fascist intellectual Eugenio Colorni; they married in 1978, and Eva Colorni died in 1985. Sen subsequently married Emma Rothschild, a British historian of economic thought and a professor at Harvard University.

Sen's family has been from Dhaka, now the capital of Bangladesh, and he has maintained connections to the cultural life of Bengal throughout his career. In early 2026, Sen was in the news after receiving a Special Summary Revision (SIR) hearing summons from the West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer's office, which was later clarified as being related to a minor spelling error in the voter list, and the Election Commission confirmed that he was not required to attend.

Recognition

Sen's contributions have been recognized with numerous awards and honours throughout his career. The most prominent among these include:

• Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (1998): Sen received the Nobel Prize for his contributions to welfare economics, including his work on social choice theory, the measurement of poverty and inequality, and the capability approach.

• Bharat Ratna (1999): India's highest civilian honour was conferred on Sen in recognition of his contribution to welfare economics.

• Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (2020): The German Publishers and Booksellers Association awarded Sen this prize for his "pioneering scholarship addressing issues of global justice and combating social inequality in education and healthcare."

Sen has received honorary degrees from numerous universities around the world. Time magazine profiled him following his Nobel Prize. He has also been described in the media as bringing a moral dimension to economic analysis; a BusinessWeek article referred to him as "The Mother Teresa of Economics."

In an interview with NDTV, Sen reflected on receiving honours, saying: "If you get an honour you think you don't deserve, it's still very pleasant."

Legacy

Sen's intellectual legacy extends across multiple disciplines and has influenced both theoretical scholarship and practical policy. His capability approach has become one of the foundational frameworks in development studies and has reshaped how international organizations conceptualize and measure human progress. The Human Development Index, introduced by the United Nations Development Programme in 1990 and developed with significant input from Sen's ideas, shifted the global discourse on development away from a narrow focus on GDP per capita toward a broader measure incorporating life expectancy, education, and standard of living.

His entitlement approach to famines transformed the understanding of food crises among economists, policymakers, and humanitarian organizations. By demonstrating that famines are economic and political failures rather than purely natural disasters, Sen's work contributed to a paradigm shift in famine prevention and response. His argument linking democratic governance and press freedom to famine prevention has been widely discussed and debated in development policy circles.

Sen's work on gender inequality, particularly the "missing women" thesis, has had lasting impact on research and policy related to women's health, nutrition, and survival in developing countries. The concept of "missing women" became a standard reference point in discussions of gender-based discrimination in health and demographic outcomes.

As a public intellectual, Sen has continued to engage in debates about the direction of Indian and global economic policy into his nineties. His emphasis on the importance of education, healthcare, and social infrastructure as prerequisites for sustainable economic development continues to inform policy discussions. In 2025 and 2026, he remained active in public commentary, speaking at institutions such as the London School of Economics and weighing in on issues of secularism, development models, and social welfare in India.

His scholarship has influenced a generation of economists, philosophers, and development practitioners, and his interdisciplinary approach — bridging economics, philosophy, and social science — has helped establish new fields of inquiry at the intersection of these disciplines.