Pranab Bardhan is Professor of Graduate School at the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was educated at Presidency College, Kolkata and Cambridge University, England. He had been at the faculty of MIT, Indian Statistical Institute and Delhi School of Economics before joining Berkeley. He held the Distinguished Fulbright Chair at the University of Siena, Italy in 2008-9, and was the BP Centennial Professor at London School of Economics for 2010-11. He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982. He has done theoretical and field studies research on rural institutions in poor countries, on political economy of development policies, and on globalization. A part of his work is in the interdisciplinary area of economics, political science, and social anthropology. He was Chief Editor of the Journal of Development Economics for 1985-2003. He is the author of 14 books and editor of 13 other books, His two recent popular-level books are Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India (Princeton, 2013) and Globalization, Democracy and Corruption (Frontpage, 2015). Email: bardhan [at] econ.berkeley.edu
Website: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~webfac/bardhan/bardhan.htm
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. At my ISI office there were several good economists. Apart from TN, there was B.S. Minhas, Kirit Parikh, Suresh Tendulkar, Sanjit Bose (my friend from MIT days), V.K. Chetty, Dipankar Dasgupta, and others. Of these in many ways the most colorful…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Growing up in India I knew how hierarchical and status-oriented Indian society was, but the city of New Delhi took it to a bureaucratic extreme. I was told that in those days, if you gave out your Government quarters address, people…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Over the years I have heard many stories about Mahalanobis. One relates to his youth. He and Sukumar Ray (Satyajit Ray’s father, a pioneer in Bengali literature of nonsense rhymes and gibberish) were the two contemporary Brahmo whiz kids active in…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Though I decided to go back to India, which institution I’d join there took some more time to determine. I had a standing invitation from K.N. Raj at the Delhi School of Economics. Even before I left MIT he asked me…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. At MIT outside the Economics Department there was one scholar, whose several lectures I have attended was Noam Chomsky. I knew of him as a pioneer in modern linguistic theory, but his fame in the outside world is as America’s topmost…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. When I first attended the occasional Harvard-MIT joint faculty seminar I was dazzled by the number of luminaries in the gathering and the very high quality of discussion. Among the younger participants Joe Stiglitz was quite active, and his intensity was…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. There was another well-known economist who later claimed that he was my student at MIT, but for some reason I cannot remember him from those days: this was Larry Summers, later Treasury Secretary and Harvard President. Once I was invited to…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Of the senior professors at MIT other than Samuelson and Solow, I had a somewhat close relationship with Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, a pioneer in development economics. He had grown up in Vienna and taught in England before reaching MIT. He had advised…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. At MIT I had my initiation into a breathless pace of academic activity that was quite different from the pace I had seen elsewhere until then. The whole place was a dynamo of research activity, you could almost hear the hum…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. When Robert Solow asked me in Cambridge if I’d like to join the faculty at MIT in the other Cambridge, I was taken aback, and asked for some time to think about it. Until then I never imagined living in the…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. My Presidency College friend Premen was always a voracious reader, particularly of political, social and military history. He often told me of new books in those areas and sometimes persuaded me to read them. But by the time I saw him…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Among other members in the Economics faculty at Cambridge, there was the great Italian scholar, Piero Sraffa. He was administratively the professor-in-charge of us, graduate students. So I met him a few times in that connection, but never quite intellectually engaged…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Shortly after my arrival at Cambridge I struck up a warm friendship with a very bright young faculty member, Jim Mirrlees (who was to get the Nobel Prize later), recently returned from a stint of research in India. (Although he was…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. I knew that Cambridge was by the river Cam, but the first day when I looked for it I could not find it. From the map I knew that on my way to the Economics Department I had to cross it,…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. At age twenty-three, after a brief stint of teaching at Calcutta University, I, accompanied by Kalpana, proceeded to Britain on a Commonwealth Scholarship. The Scholars from different parts of India were asked to assemble in Delhi, from where we were to…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Presidency College had a good Department of Economics and Political Science. I’d say that the teaching standard at my time there would compare quite favorably with the standard I found later when teaching undergraduate classes in Berkeley. I remember in my…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Sachin Chaudhuri, who lived in Bombay, came to know, I think from Binod Chaudhuri, about my teenage forays into writing political pieces, and he asked me to share them with him, and sent back detailed (handwritten) comments on them. A little…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Even though I arrived at Economics with the aim of interpreting history, it soon gave me a more general perspective. First, it showed me the value of precision and empirical testing in thinking about socially important issues. This immediately appealed to…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. In spite of my abiding interest in literature when I came to college I was vaguely inclined to major in History. In the long break between school and college I chanced upon two books of Marxist history which opened me to…
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. One remarkable redeeming feature of my dingy neighborhood in Kolkata was that within half a mile or so there was my historically distinctive school, and across the street from there was Presidency College, one of the very best undergraduate colleges in…