Sukhamoy Chakravarty (26 July 1934 – 22 August 1990) was an Indian economist who, along with

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis OBE, FNA, FASc, FRS (29 June 1893 – 28 June 1972) was an Indian scientist and statistician. He is best remembered for the Mahalanobis distance, a statistical measure, and for being one of the members of the fi ...

, was a key architect of the

Five-Year plans of India The Five-Year Plans of India were a series of national development programmes implemented by the Government of India from 1951 to 2017. Inspired by the Soviet model, these plans aimed to promote balanced economic growth, reduce poverty and ...

. He attended Ballygunge Government High School,

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and Presidency College, Kolkata when it was under

University of Calcutta The University of Calcutta, informally known as Calcutta University (), is a Public university, public State university (India), state university located in Kolkata, Calcutta (Kolkata), West Bengal, India. It has 151 affiliated undergraduate c ...

as an Economics major, where he was a batchmate of

Amartya Sen Amartya Kumar Sen (; born 3 November 1933) is an Indian economist and philosopher. Sen has taught and worked in England and the United States since 1972. In 1998, Sen received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions ...

. He later attended the

Delhi School of Economics Delhi School of Economics (DSE), popularly referred to as D School, is an institution of higher learning within the Delhi University. The Delhi School of Economics is situated in University of Delhi's North Campus in Maurice Nagar. Establishe ...

and obtained a doctorate from

Erasmus University Rotterdam Erasmus University Rotterdam ( ; abbreviated as EUR) is a public research university located in Rotterdam, Netherlands. The university is named after Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, a 15th-century Christian humanist and theologian. Erasmus M ...

under

Jan Tinbergen Jan Tinbergen ( , ; 12 April 1903 – 9 June 1994) was a Dutch economist who was awarded the first Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1969, which he shared with Ragnar Frisch for having developed and applied dynamic models for the ana ...

. He assumed a teaching post at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

but returned to India to join the Planning Commission. He was a professor of economics at the

. Sukhamoy was a highly creative and prodigious scholar, and a voracious reader. He was one of the most outstanding Indian economists of the 20th century with rare social awareness and commitment. His initial interest in high theory and mathematical economics gave way to practical policy analysis of issues relating to the under-privileged. He had put his phenomenal scholarship to continued application in the study of development issues. He left an indelible impression on the intellectual world. Samuelson and Tinbergen were Chakravarty's life-long admirers. When Chakravarty died his teacher Tinbergen remarked that he had learned more from Chakravarty than Chakravarty learning from him. In 1983-1984, Sukhamoy Chakravarty was one of the seventeen members of the Independent Commission for World-Wide Telecommunications Development chaired by Donald Maitland (International Telecommunication Union/ITU).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Chakravarty, Sukhamoy 1934 births 1990 deaths 20th-century Indian economists Fellows of the Econometric Society