Amartya Sen To Be Honoured With Spain's Princess Of Asturias Award 2021

  • 29 May 2021

  • Nobel laureate Amartya Kumar Sen, an Indian economist and philosopher who studied the causes of famines, will be recognised with this year’s Princess of Asturias award in the social sciences category.
  • The award is one of eight prizes, including in the arts, communications and sports, handed out annually by the Asturias Princess Foundation, which is named for Spanish Crown Princess Leonor.
  • Sen has devoted his career to studying poverty and theories of human development. His 1981 essay on Entitlement and Deprivation famously proved that the greatest famines in history took place when food was available but some groups couldn’t access it.
  • Sen’s theories on a person’s capacity, interacting with the concept of “positive freedom,” or absence of interference, have been incorporated into different social science disciplines and inspired UN development plans.