Amartya Sen, the 1998-Nobel Laureate in Economics, was born on November 3, 1933 at Shantiniketan, West Bengal, India. He is the sixth Indian to get the Nobel and the first Asian winner of the Economics Prize. He became the youngest chairman of the Department of Economics, Jadavpur University, at the age of 23. He has been the President of the Econometric Society (1984), the International Economic Association (1986-89), the Indian Economic Association (1989) and the American Economic Association (1994). He has taught at Calcutta, Delhi, Oxford, Cambridge, the London School of Economics, and Harvard. He has been honored with Honorary D.Litt degrees and fellowships of a large number of Indian and Foreign Universities and Institutes of repute. Sen was awarded Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award in India.

Sen was awarded the Nobel, known as the Bank of Sweden Prize, worth $ 978,000. The honor went to him for his contributions to welfare economics, which help explain mechanisms underlying famines and poverty. His emphasis on welfare economics and definition of poverty in relation to development have at once offered a new philosophy and an alternative way to solid economic development. Sen has written extensively on such diverse topics as objectivity, liberalism and agency.

Professor Sen is currently Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, U.K. Robert Solow, an MIT Nobel Laureate, called Sen the ‘Conscience of Economics’.