Lessons from a life

Learning from the illustrious career of T N Srinivasan

The sad news that T N Srinivasan, who was for long one of the pillars of the economics department at Yale University, passed away in Chennai on Saturday should cause a stock-taking not just of his illustrious career but also of the state of thinking about economic policy in India today. Srinivasan, who was 85, was in the forefront of his field for more than six decades; his first major work on the “choice of techniques” problem — what technological choices are appropriate for developing countries — was published in 1961, at around the same time that Amartya Sen was