CTK’s entry into economics was inspired by the vision of his ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech, and especially Jawaharlal Nehru’s admonition that “Indian service means… ending poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity.” As explained in a 2012 interview published in the newsletter of the World Economic Association, when he decided in his last high school year to study economics, there was hope “I will be able to understand the causes of poverty. and contribute to its elimination.
CTK’s description of his own decision to study economics, which he made in his final year of high school, reflects this spirit. As explained in the interview, much of the public discussion at that time was about the theme that since “political freedom has been achieved, attention must be shifted to achieving economic freedom, especially for the masses who are in poverty.” And he studied economics in the hope that “I will be able to understand the causes of poverty and contribute to their elimination.”
It was this effort that drove CTK’s scientific efforts for the next seven decades.
Amartya Sen, describing the general dissatisfaction with the economy, once stated that “the general dissatisfaction with the economy … is reflected in India for a better reason, because in some ways, the economic problems are more serious, worse, in India than today. many parts of the world. Also, the focus of Western economics is often far removed from India’s economic problems. Of course, the comparative failure of the standard economy to deliver these goods should be taken into account more clearly in India.
It is the same with CTK. It was the 1950s and CTK was now a Lecturer at Madras Christian College, Tambaram. Anxieties about the “disjunction between theory and real problems” made him want to complement economic theory. He decided to study Ph. D. and entered the doctoral program at Stanford University in 1958.
Stanford then became the center of a special debate in the discipline of economics. While the Marxist economist and theorist, Paul Baran, was on the faculty, neo-classical economics was the dominant ideology. CTK undertook the task of understanding the debates and the issues at stake and here he took the main steps he would take throughout his life: testing his theories by confronting India’s economic problems. They set themselves the task of testing claims about the universality of neoclassical economics by applying it to the literature on surplus labor. At the end of this effort, the scales have fallen from his eyes. What we want now is “a conceptualization of economics other than the neo-classical theories it provides and the ‘dual economy’ model that assumes a subsistence wage is needed for a proper understanding of … India’s economic problems.”
He has developed an alternative: he can also show that “the distribution of non-labor resources is central to understanding the Indian economy and its problems. In teaching undergraduate courses, I maintain that three related questions are necessary to understand the economy: ‘Who owns what? ‘, ‘Who does what?’, and ‘Who gets what?'”.
So, in the 1960s, it was back to Madras Christian College, where CTK designed and taught an important course titled Indian Economic Problems (IEP). I had the good fortune of being a student in CTK’s IEP class from 1969-72. He is a demanding taskmaster. Unlike many other CTK students, his introduction to Marxism and elements of Leftist theory came earlier, and from outside the classroom. However, what CTK does is teach us to use economic theory to build a toolbox to examine and analyze specific issues regarding the Indian economy. They then help us study various economic sectors – agriculture, livestock, industry, the informal sector, banking, primary services, marketing and trade, the Plan model, the public sector, and many others – using this conceptual tool. CTK sometimes also asks us to stand up: is there anyone in the class, he asked after we studied land reform, who opposes land reform? Voices were exhibited, no hand was seen – whether it was due to conviction or persuasion or fear of being shown, no one could say – and the class continued.
Years later, I discovered that this period was also a turning point in the economic understanding of CTK. In 2019, when I once wrote to him about how India’s economic class kept coming back to me, he wrote:
“I always remember the course on Indian Economic Problems 1969-72 that I shared with you all. It was my way of showing my protest against the teaching of neo-classical economics as “Economic Theory” …Yes, that course and those years defined my professional career. ”
The years from 1968 to 1978, the last decade at Madras Christian College, were not only years of teaching, but also years of prolific research and writing. In this period, CTK published, among other writings, The Indian Economic Crisis (1968), A Theoretical Approach to the Indian Economy (1969), and, in 1978, his best-known book of the period, Poverty, Planning and Social Transformation (book last in the list dedicated to “my teacher, many of my students, who ask).”
In 1974, the CTK proposed a rural labor guarantee scheme (in the form of a “land army”) for India; The first person, as far as I know, is done. In 2021, on CTK’s 90th birthday, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan paid tribute to the “consistent supporter of policies that benefited the masses”, drawing special attention to the fact that CTK had been an early advocate of rural employment guarantees.
In 1978, CTK took the major decision to leave Madras Christian College to become the founding director of the Madras Institute of Development Studies. MIDS, founded by CTK teacher Malcolm Adiseshiah a few years earlier, has been made a National Institute of the Indian Council of Social Science Research. Under the distinguished and democratic leadership of CTK, MIDS became Tamil Nadu’s first and foremost Center for the study of economics, drawing young and more senior scholars from around the world, and, while primarily concerned with the discipline of economics, also participating. anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, and historians in academic programs. This regional economic concentration is also reflected in the books CTK wrote during this period, including Dynamics of Rural Transformation (1979) and Economic Change in Tamil Nadu (with Josef James, 1979).
After retiring from the directorship of MIDS, CTK became a National Professor of the University Grants Commission and a National Fellow of the ICSSR. His early retirement books, including On Markets in Economic Theory and Policy (1993) and Rethinking Economics: Reflections Based on a Study of the Indian Economy (1996), were the product of many years of thinking about the Indian economy.
Another feature of his retirement years was a renewed interest in writing book reviews, particularly in Frontline magazine. When he told me that, for him, it was a way to stay in touch with current thinking, especially in economics, for the readers of his concise and clear reviews, with a fair and objective summary of the author’s arguments and CTK’s own final comments, they were always interesting and educative .
In his last two books, Wealth and Illfare: An Expedition into Real Life Economics (2012) and Economics of Real-Life: A New Exposition (2018), CTK seeks to reconnect with young people, to reach new students of economics who are struggling, like which he did in the 1950s, with a “disjunction between theory and real problems.”
In recent years, especially after moving to Kerala, CTK has drawn attention to the country’s economy. He continued to discuss with me through correspondence and conversations at his home about the planning process (example of an extract from an e-mail: “Now I am back reading the State Development Report … I wonder if I can get a copy of the Approach Paper to the 13th Five Year Plan from Government of Kerala.”). He talked in detail about the achievements of local government in Kerala and the health and food security system. CTK’s final review of Frontline – a coda to “frontline years” – is a review of the Kerala Development Report 2021, an appreciation and appreciation of Kerala’s development experience, especially during the 13th five-year plan.
When CTK teaches a course on Indian economics, the question we ask when we start and end is “What are the main problems facing India’s economy today?” And he has no doubt about the answer: it is the poverty and deprivation of hundreds of millions of people in our society. Listening to him then, in my wildest dreams, I would have imagined that, directing a student of Indian economics 50 years ago, and asking the same question, I would have to answer: if hundreds of millions of people in our country continue to live in poverty, malnutrition and deprivation, suffer from avoidable diseases, are denied free and universal education, and are subject to the worst forms of class, caste, and gender oppression. The world is a poorer place for the deaths of people like CTK, who help us identify poverty and its social and economic characteristics and inspire us to come together to fight for a just society.
(VK Ramachandran, economist, and Vice-Chairman of the Kerala State Planning Board, writes about his teacher)