Amartya Sen award to be shelved?

NEW DELHI: For all practical purposes, the prestigious Amartya Sen award given by the Indian Council of Social Science Research has been shelved.

Though officially

ICSSR

says it has not been told by the

HRD

ministry to close the award, there has been no work to finalise awardees since BJP-led NDA government came to power. Last

award

was given in 2013. A senior ICSSR official said, “There has been no formal order but there is enough signal that ICSSR will not take it forward. Amartya Sen has been critical of this government. He had a run-in with external affairs ministry on Nalanda University.”

ICSSR sources said new government had raised few queries about the award. HRD ministry wanted to know why is the award amount Rs 10 lakh. Ministry also wanted to know why there are so many categories of awards. Award is given for high quality research in economics, commerce/management, sociology/ social work / social anthropology, political science /international studies / public administration, geography / population studies, psychology / education, legal studies/ human rights, gender / marginalized group studies, history / archaeology and philosophy / cultural studies.

Early last year, ICSSR said it had initiated the process of selection which would be finalized soon. It had also said anomalies in the award rules were pointed by ICSSR governing council. For instance, it was said it is not proper that even members of the governing council could nominate scholars for the award. At the same time the final approval of the awardees was done by the governing council. This raised the issue of conflict of interest. More than a year has lapsed since the rules were changed but nothing has been done to shortlist awardees.

The first Amartya Sen award was given to six scholars. The awardees were first shortlisted by ten sub-committees of various subjects and finally a committee headed by jurist Upendra Baxi and consisting of eminent social scientists finalized the names. Though there are ten awards for as many social science subjects to be given, in the first year only six social scientists were chosen. The idea behind the award is to honour high-level social science research just the way Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award does for science research.