The Unassuming Economist

T.N. Srinivasan towered over the field of Indian economics like a colossus. His death in Chennai on Sunday truly marks the end of an era.

Srinivasan, or TN, as he was widely known, initially trained to be a statistician. He studied at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata. An uninspiring stint in Mumbai, doing statistical quality control at the textile mills, led him to write to Tjalling Koopmans at Yale University.

Koopmans, who would later win the 1975 Nobel Prize in economics, took the young Indian under his wing. Under the master, Srinivasan studied operations research and linear programming, skills that were especially important in the age of national planning, when resources were sought to be optimally allocated with minimal recourse to the price system. Srinivasan wrote his doctoral thesis on the choice of techniques. Amartya Sen was grappling with the same issue at the same time at Cambridge University, under the guidance of Joan Robinson.

TN returned to India to join the Indian Statistical Institute in New Delhi in 1962. He also worked with the Planning Commission at a time when the government was brimming with young economics talent, including Srinivasan, Sen, Jagdish Bhagwati, V.K. Ramaswami, Pranab Bardhan and B.S. Minhas in New Delhi; and Deena Khatkhate, Anand Chandavarkar, V.V. Bhatt and M. Narasimham in Mumbai.

Srinivasan found himself doing work for the perspective planning division headed by the formidable Pitambar Pant. Its task was to assess the economic needs of the country over the 15 years from 1961 to 1976. One of the products of the division, with Srinivasan playing an active role, was on an issue that has become resonant in our times—basic minimum income for all Indians. Srinivasan and Bardhan would later write in 1974: “The stage has come when we should sharply focus our efforts on providing an assured minimum income to every citizen of the country within a reasonable period of time. Progressively this minimum itself should be raised as development goes apace.”

The next few decades would see Srinivasan write a series of technical papers on statistics, trade theory, economic development, agriculture and microeconomics. As the economist V.N. Balasubramanyam wrote in an introduction to an interview with Srinivasan, few scholars can list among their publications both A Note On Approximation To Finite Sample Moments Of Estimation Whose Exact Sampling Distribution is Unknown and Destitution: A Discourse. No wonder he was a fellow of both the Econometric Society and the American Philosophical Society.”