New Delhi: Amiya Bagchi, famed political economist and economic historian, has passed away. He was 88.
Bagchi taught, researched and guided research in many institutions and universities including Presidency College, Kolkata, the UK’s University of Cambridge and Cornell University in the US.
Until 2005, Bagchi was a member of the Bengal Planning Board, set up to report on the finances of the government during the Tenth
Five Year Plan period. He was the official historian of State Bank of India until 1997.
He retired as the Reserve Bank of India professor from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Kolkata in 2001, and shortly afterwards founded the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata in 2002. He was its director until his retirement in 2012.
He received the Padmi Shri in 2005.
Bagchi’s wife, feminist scholar Jasodhara Bagchi, passed away in 2015. He is survived by his daughters, scholars Tista and Barnita Bagchi.
His books remain landmark works of scholarship. Economist Jayati Ghosh has described him, as “one of the great intellectual giants of our times, whose sharp, insightful political economy analyses taught us so much about economic processes…”.
Writer Amitav Ghosh described him as an “exceptional scholar [who] has left a lasting mark on economic history.”
His edited books include (with Nirmala Banerjee as co-editor) Change and Choice in Indian Industry (1981); New Technology and the Worker’s Response: Microelectronics, Labour and Society (1995); Democracy and Development (1995); Economy and Organization: Indian Institutions under the Neoliberal Regime (1999); (with Dipankar Sinha and Barnita Bagchi) Webs of History: Information, Communication and Technology from Early to Post-colonial India (2005); (with Krishna Soman as co-editor) Maladies, Preventives and Curatives (2005); and (with Gary Dymski) Capture and Exclude: Developing Economies and the Poor in Global Finance (2007).