“He suffered a heart attack around 11 pm. We rushed him to the hospital, but it was all over by the time we got there," Pronab Sen told PTI.
Pronab Sen is also an economist and was the chairman of the National Statistical Commission and Chief Statistician of India.
Abhijit Sen was a strong advocate of the public distribution system of food grains and a distinguished rural economy expert.
During his career spanning over four decades, Sen taught economics at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University. He was also the chairman of the Commission for Agricultural Costs & Prices (CACP) in the first Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA government.
He chaired various official committees on agriculture notably the one on long term grain policy, and the Tenth Plan Subgroup on Agricultural Economics and Rural Development.
He authored the report of the High Level Committee on Long Term Grain Policy, submitted in July 2000 that recommended that the CACP be made an empowered statutory body and that the C2 cost of production be used for fixation of minimum support prices (MSP) of grains. C2 is the comprehensive cost of production to include imputed value of unpaid family labor and rent and interest foregone on owned land and fixed capital assets. This was incorporated by M S Swaminathan in the Swaminathan Committee Report, which recommended that that the MSP should be at least 50% more than the the C2 price of any crop.
Sen had a distinguished academic career with a PhD in Economics from the University of Cambridge in 1981 and wrote a thesis titled "The agrarian constraint to economic development: the case of India" under supervision of Prof. J. A. Rowthor.
During the United Progressive Alliance regime between 2004 and 2014, Sen was a member of the Planning Commission. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan for public service in 2010.
Sen was also adviser and consultant with international organizations, such as the United Nations Development Programme, International Labour Organization, Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations, OECD Development Centre, the UN University World Institute of Development Research, International Fund for Agricultural Development, and Asian Development Bank.
He leaves behind his wife Jayati Ghosh, a prominent economist, and their daughter Jahnavi.
