Economist Abhijit Sen: An advocate of MSP, universal public distribution system

Sandeep Dikshit

Abhijit Sen, with his flowing beard and shoulder length hair, who enthralled generations of students at JNU’s Centre for Economics and Planning and built the edifice on which the Swaminathan Commission on minimum support prices was based, passed away here on Tuesday after a heart attack.

Sen was 72 and is survived by his economist wife Jayati Ghosh and a journalist daughter. His brother, Pronab Sen, was the chairman of the National Statistical Commission and Chief Statistician of India.

Belonging to a rapidly diminishing circle of Marxist-leaning economists, Dr Sen rubbed shoulders with the doyens of developmental economists in India such as Jean Dreze, Jayati Ghosh, Pranab Bardhan, Pulin Nayak, Partha Mukhopadhyay, Shubhashis Gangopadhyay and Dipa Sinha.

His brand of economics was utilised by the Left supported United Front and UPA Governments as well as briefly by the Atal Behari Vajpayee regime. But the Modi dispensation disbanded the Planning Commission as well as relegated Sen, who was a member, and his ideological compatriots to the sidelines with little need for their counsel.

Sen’s 10-year stint at the Planning Commission from 2004 to 2014 was preceded by his stewardship of the Commission for Agricultural Costs & Prices (CACP) spanning the Communists’-supported United Front and then the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA government from 1997-2000.

It was a CACP report that wanted minimum support prices to be fixed based on the ‘C2’ cost of production (all cultivation expenses and imputed value of unpaid family labour)—that led to the “Swaminathan formula” with some modifications.

He also declared that the “below poverty line” approach to subsidised foodgrain distribution was a failure and proposed a universal public distribution system. This was incorporated in the UPA government’s National Food Security Act under which a third of the country’s population gets wheat and rice at Rs 2 and Rs 3 per kg, respectively.

Beginning with a PhD from Oxford, the bulk of Sen’s teaching career beginning from 1985 was at JNU where he rubbed shoulders with other Marxist-leaning economists who were also appointed there in copious numbers. In 2010, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan for public service.