Indian Teachers Of International Repute

Teaching is one of the noblest professions. India has a deep-rooted history as far as the field of education is concerned and the contribution, talent and skills of our very own teachers and educationalists have been appreciated globally.

All superheroes do not wear capes, some of them are teachers. On this Teacher’s Day, BW Education is acknowledging these modern pillars of education that have not only contributed immensely to Indian education system but have made their name globally. Be the field of STEM education or humanities, Indian academicians have left no stone unturned. Naming all of them is like counting stars in the sky, so we are presenting below a few scholars:

Amartya Sen

Indian economist Amartya Sen was awarded with Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in the year 1998 for his contributions to social choice theory, welfare economics and for his interest in the problems of society’s poorest members. He is known for his work on the causes of famine, which led to the development of practical solutions for preventing or limiting the effects of real or perceived shortages of food.

He studied at Presidency College in Calcutta, which is now Kolkata. He has received his BA (1955), an MA (1959) and a PhD (1959) from Trinity College, Cambridge. He has taught economics at a number of universities in England and India, including the Universities of Jadavpur (1956–58) and Delhi (1963–71), the London School of Economics, the University of London (1971–77), and the University of Oxford (1977–88), before moving to Harvard University (1988–98), where he was professor of economics and philosophy. In 1998 Sen was appointed as master of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1998, a position he held until 2004, after returning to Harvard as Lamont University Professor.

Born on: November 3, 1933; Born in: Santiniketan

CR Rao

Calyampudi Radhakrishnan Rao is noted among the world’s most eminent statisticians. He spent nearly all of his professional career in India. Having researched and taught at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata, Rao pioneered several fundamental statistical concepts such as the Cramer–Rao inequality and Rao–Blackwellization, concepts that are featured in undergraduate textbooks on econometrics and statistics.

He joined the ISI as a student when it was formed by Dr PC Mahanobilis when statistics as a subject was still in its nascent stage and was yet to be taught as a specific subject at the master’s level. He was sent to Cambridge University, United Kingdom, to utilise certain statistical techniques for anthropological analysis and from there he earned his PhD under the supervision of Ronald Fischer, among the pioneers of the field.

Born on: September 10, 1920; Born in: Hadagali, Bellary District, Karnataka; Died on: August 22, 2023

Arvind Panagariya

Seasoned economist and Padma Bhushan awardee, ex-vice chairman of NITI Aayog, former chief economist of the Asian Development Bank and India’s G20 sherpa ‘Arvind Panagariya’ is currently professor of economics and the Jagdish Bhagwati Professor of Indian Political Economy at Columbia University, the US. He has also served as the chancellor of Nalanda University in Bihar, designated an ‘institution of national importance’. He is also the director of Deepak and Neera Raj Centre on Indian Economic Policies at School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University in New York City. He holds a PhD degree in economics from Princeton University under the doctoral supervision of William Hoban Branson and Peter Kenen. 

Born on: September 30, 1952; Born in: Rajasthan

Meghnad Desai

Meghnad Jagdishchandra Desai, Baron Desai has been awarded the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award of India, in the year 2008. Renowned academic Desai is Professor Emeritus at the London School of Economics. He is a life peer at the British House of Lords and has 38 years of teaching experience. Lord Meghnad Desai is a world-known commentator on globalisation and deglobalisation. He is presently serving as the founder chairman of the Meghnad Desai Academy of Economics. A regular columnist for British and Indian newspapers, he has published numerous scholarly articles and various books.

Born on: July 10, 1940; Born in: Vadodara, Gujarat

Abhijit Benerjee

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee after studying at the University of Calcutta and Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, earned his doctorate at Harvard University in the United States in 1998. He taught at Princeton University and Harvard University prior to becoming a Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he presently works. Abhijit Banerjee shares the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with his fellow researcher, Esther Duflo, who is also his wife. Both of his parents were also professors of economics. He founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) along with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan in the year 2003 and is one of the directors of the lab. Banerjee is the author of scores of articles and five books, including ‘Poor Economics’, which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year and ‘Good Economics for Hard Times’, both co-authored with Esther Duflo.

Born on: 21 February 1961; Born in: Mumbai

Gita Gopinath

Gita Gopinath is the First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF); she has earlier served as the Chief Economist of the Fund from the year 2019 to 2022. In that role, she was the economic counsellor of the Fund and Ddirector of its research department. Before joining IMF, Gopinath was the John Zwaanstra Professor of international studies and of economics at Harvard University’s economics department from 2005 to 2022. Prior to that, she was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business from 2001 to 2005. Her research focusses on International Finance and Macroeconomics. She has authored various research articles on international financial crises, exchange rates, trade and investment, emerging market crises, monetary policy and debt.

She is a member of the Group of Thirty, also an elected fellow of Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has earlier served as the co-director of the International Finance and Macroeconomics programme at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a member of the economic advisory panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. She has co-edited the current Handbook of International Economics and has also co-edited the American Economic Review. She has been the managing editor of the Review of Economic Studies.

Born on: December 8, 1971; Born in: Kolkata

Raghuram Rajan

Raghuram Govinda Rajan is the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at Chicago Booth. He was the 23rd governor of the Reserve Bank of India and served from September 2013 to September 2016. He has served as the director of research and the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, between 2003 and 2006.

His area of research are banking, economic development and corporate finance. He has authored many books including ‘The Third Pillar: How the State and Markets hold the Community Behind 2019’ and ‘Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy’.

He was the president of the American Finance Association in the year 2011, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and also a member of the Group of Thirty. The American Finance Association awarded him the inaugural Fischer Black Prize in January 2003, for the best finance researcher under the age of 40. The other awards that he has received include the Infosys prize for the Economic Sciences in 2012, the Deutsche Bank Prize for Financial Economics in 2013, Euromoney Central Banker Governor of the Year 2014 and Banker Magazine (FT Group) Central Bank Governor of the Year 2016.

Born on: February 3, 1963; Born in: Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh