Two Bengali Economists In Global Thinkers List

Guwahati: Two Bengali Nobel laureates from Indian sub-continent have been ranked 3rd and 5th among global influential thinkers in 2014 Global Thought Leader survey.

The worldwide survey, carried out by the Zurich-based Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute for Economic & Social Studies (GDI) and MIT Sloan School researcher Peter Gloor, put Bengali economist Amartya Sen on the third and Bangladeshi economist turned revolutionary banker Muhammad Yunus on the fifth position among hundred global influential leaders.

The top position in the list is occupied by Pope Francis, where as the second position went for Tim Berners-Lee, who is popularly known as the Pope of the Internet. Czech writer Milan Kundera is in the forth rank of the list. Similarly, from 6th to 10th positions of the list were held by novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, physicist Murray Gell-Mann, novelist Paulo Coelho, anthropologist Jane Goodall and author Naomi Klein.

Others who figured in the prestigious list include Nobel laureate Pakistani children right activist Malala Yousafzai, Indian author Salman Rushdie, medicine expert Deepak Chopra, scientist Vilayanur Ramachandran, author Pankaj Mishra, novelist Arundhati Roy, Chinese entrepreneur Wang Shi, chess champion turned Russian politician Garry Kasparov, scientist Stephen Hawking, communist thinker Noam Chomsky, Politician turned ecologist Al Gore, information hero Edward Snowden etc.

Indian economist and philosopher Sen has contributed tremendously in the field of welfare economics, social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines etc, while Yunus is recognized as a social entrepreneur and civil society leader across the globe.

AMARTYASEN