Prosenjit Datta
Dr Abhijit Sen, renowned economist, former member of the Planning Commission, and the strongest votary of universal Public Distribution System passed away on Monday, 29 August 2022. He was 72. A renowned agricultural economist, he was the chairman of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices set up by the A B Vajpayee government. The commission was the first to propose that C2 costs be used for calculating the Minimum Support Price (MSP) of grains.
C2 is the comprehensive cost of production including imputed costs of family labour, imputed rent of owned land and imputed interest on owned capital. This would later be taken up by M S Swaminathan in the Swaminathan Committee Report which advocated that the MSP should be at least 50% higher than the the C2 price of any crop.
Dr Sen spoke softly but had clear insights and could easily pinpoint fallacious economic arguments. I had the pleasure of inviting him to a couple of panel discussions when I was editing Business Today magazine. All members of the panel would listen carefully when he made a point irrespective of their economic and political leanings.
Dr Abhijit Sen’s wife is also a renowned economist, Dr Jayati Sen and his brother Dr Pronab Sen is also an economist and one of the of the foremost experts on national statistics.
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