Abhijit Sen (1950−2022) was born to a Bengali family from Dhaka who moved to India after independence. His father Samar Ranjan Sen was an economist who taught at Dhaka University and shifted to the world of policy after moving to India. Sen grew up in Delhi. He studied at Sardar Patel Vidyalaya and was a school topper. He then completed his BSc in Physics from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi. While studying physics for a Tripos at the University of Cambridge, he shifted to economics, subsequently completing his PhD in economics from Cambridge. He taught for several years in different universities in the UK before returning to India to join the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning (CESP) at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in 1985. 

Even though he remained a faculty at CESP for almost 30 years until his retirement in 2015, he also spent considerable time in the government, first as chairperson of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) in 1997 and later as member of the Planning Commission from 2004 to 2014. While he continued in his official positions on leave from the university, he continued to teach and supervise students at CESP throughout. He was among the few academic economists who straddled the world of academia and policy making with equal ease and commitment. 

Sen belonged to a family of economists and policy-makers. Not just his father, even his brother Pronab Sen is an economist who has worked as an adviser to the Planning Commission and later became the Chief Statistician of India and Chairperson of the National Statistical Commission. His spouse Jayati Ghosh is also an economist of international repute. 

Sen’s shift from physics to economics was partly driven by his desire to understand the Indian economy which was going through a turbulent period in the 1970s. This was also a period of intellectual debate on the strategy for economic development. Given his formal training in the natural sciences he was comfortable with the rigours of mathematical modelling and applied theory, which is evident in his doctoral work. He was equally comfortable with the various traditions of heterodox economics, including Marxian, which were dominant in the debate on Indian planning and analysis of Indian agriculture. It was his ability to approach any issue with first principles that allowed him to navigate through different paradigms without getting boxed into any of the existing theoretical frameworks. The second principle that helped him was his unwavering belief in data and facts from multiple sources, primary as well as secondary. This approach often allowed him to think out of the box and come up with explanations which would otherwise not fit any of the existing frameworks. 

His unpublished PhD thesis was titled The Agrarian Constraint to Economic Development: The Case of India¹. Based on careful empirical analysis of the Indian economy, and agriculture in particular, until the mid-1970s, Sen argued that the agrarian constraint was the primary constraint to growth in India during the first three decades after independence². This was in contrast to the dominant theories of the time that focussed on the savings and foreign exchange constraints³. He saw technological fixes such as the Green Revolution as inadequate strategies for an agriculture sector that was beset with surplus labour and poor infrastructure. It was also clear that the problems of Indian agriculture could not be resolved through neoclassical solutions of sharecropping⁴. He argued for the necessity of state intervention to increase agricultural incomes and non-farm diversification in employment for any resolution of the crisis in agriculture. While his PhD journey took a long time to complete, it was the beginning of a lifelong commitment to understanding the nature of Indian agriculture. 

His belief in state intervention was further confirmed by his analysis of poverty reduction in the 1980s. He showed the importance of public expenditure in fostering non-farm diversification as a means to faster poverty reduction. This argument was against the existing consensus that agricultural growth and relative prices were the primary determinants of poverty reduction. This was also the beginning of his long-term engagement with poverty analysis, primarily using secondary data from the National Sample Survey (NSS). 

He had an excellent command over the nuances of large-scale data on the Indian economy.  Given his familiarity with NSS data, he was able to identify the source of contamination in the 1999 – 00 (55^th round) consumption expenditure data which provided the first estimate of poverty in India after economic reforms were initiated in 1991.  His subsequent work raised questions on the official claims of sharp poverty decline. Through his work on poverty estimates, he remained an important contributor⁵ to what came to be known as The Great Indian Poverty Debate. The contributions of Sen and others to this debate were instrumental in changing the way the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) collected consumption expenditure data. This led to the appointment of a committee under the chairmanship of Suresh Tendulkar to revise the poverty line. Sen played an active role in all the deliberations of this committee that led to a new consumption expenditure poverty line.

Sen spent 15 years in the government in different capacities, while he continued to be engaged with the academic world as a researcher as well as a teacher. His first full-time appointment was as the chairperson of the CACP in 1997⁶ where he spent considerable time analysing the data on costs and prices in agriculture. His book Cost of Cultivation and Farm Income with M.S. Bhatia was the first comprehensive study of CACP data until the mid-1990s, based on which he suggested that the government must make the CACP’s recommendations binding and revise Minimum Support Prices (MSP). Although his first suggestion was not accepted, the latter contributed to a debate on the methodology to fix MSP. He was also an advisor to the M.S. Swaminathan Committee which recommended a formula to fix MSP which is remunerative to the farmers rather than being ad-hoc. 

During the agriculture crisis between 1997 and 2004 he led two important committees – the ​‘Expert Committee on Rural Credit (1999−2001)’ and the ​‘High-level Committee on Long-term Foodgrain Policy (2000−2002)’. The influence of his work on agriculture-food linkages and the importance of the Public Distribution System (PDS) was visible in the recommendation for a universal PDS. Later, as the Planning Commission member in charge of agriculture he was able to use his learnings from these roles to formulate a number of reforms in agriculture. 

Along with several other factors, some of these policy initiatives were instrumental in ensuring a sharp recovery in the growth rate in agriculture after 2004, along with a rise in farmers’ incomes. Among the major initiatives in agriculture was the introduction of the Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY) which contributed to overall revival with the active engagement of states as primary stakeholders. It made the states partners in the overall agricultural strategy by incentivising them to spend a minimum proportion of their budgets on the sector. His belief in the principle of federalism was also evident in several other initiatives of the government during that time. It continued to be one of his guiding principles in his role as member of the 14^th Finance Commission. Despite a long stint in the Planning Commission where he was a member for a decade, he strongly believed in a decentralised approach, particularly to agriculture and rural development. The decentralised procurement scheme advocated by him allowed states such as Chhattisgarh, Odisha, and Madhya Pradesh to become new centres of public procurement.

Sen also influenced policies on food security and rural employment during his stint with the Planning Commission. His belief in the importance of the PDS and the active role of the State in ensuring food security helped shape the National Food Security Act (NFSA) enacted in 2013. His 2013 paper on the role of the PDS and other food-related, in-kind transfers was also an empirical validation of their role in poverty reduction and their efficacy compared to alternatives such as cash transfers. While the NFSA remains quasi-universal, it has been a landmark legislation and has played an important role in ensuring food security at times of crisis such as the COVID pandemic. As a member of the Planning Commission, he was also instrumental in convincing the government to abandon a targeted, as opposed to a universal demand-based, approach in the landmark National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) that guarantees 100 days of wage employment in a financial year to rural households.

Sen had great respect for the Indian statistical system. As a policy maker and as a user of the statistical system, he strived to make data accessible and worked towards strengthening the public institutions engaged in data collection and dissemination. He always helped young scholars in using these data and guided them, beyond his formal roles at JNU and the government. As chairperson of the CACP, he initiated the process of making raw data from the cost of cultivation studies accessible to researchers outside the government system. He also fought hard to strengthen the Agro-Economic Research Centres (AERC) as important institutions for agricultural research.He was an active member of the Indian Society of Labour Economics (ISLE) and was Conference President in 2010. He was also the Conference President of the Indian Society of Agricultural Economics (ISAE) and played an important role in reviving the society and the Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics (IJAE) during his presidency of the ISAE between 2016 and 2021. He believed that these societies and associations were important institutions for academic exchange and also for developing an Indian perspective to problems in labour and agriculture.

His contributions to the analysis of poverty and inequality are important for India but also became guiding principles for other developing countries and international institutions. In particular, his emphasis on various aspects of data collection, comparability across surveys with varying recall periods, and issues in measurement and determination of poverty, remain important even today. But it was agriculture which remained his lifelong commitment. He continued to engage with academic debates even after his retirement from JNU and from the government. He was worried about the new challenges faced by Indian agriculture and wrote about this in the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW). Sen foresaw uncertain markets leading to vulnerability and forewarned policy makers on the need to devise suitable policies to insulate and protect Indian agriculture from climatic shocks. This was his last major work.

About the author

Himanshu is Associate Professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He works on the themes of food security, inequality, and poverty. [Full profile]