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Ashok Mitra (10 April 1928 – 1 May 2018) was an Indian economist and Marxist politician. He was a chief economic adviser to the Government of India and later became finance minister of West Bengal and a member of the Rajya Sabha.

Early life and education

After completing his graduation from the University of Dacca, he came to India following the partition of India in 1947. Although he attended postgraduate classes in economics at the University of Calcutta, he was refused admission there. He moved to Banaras Hindu University where he earned an M.A. in economics. He joined the newly established Delhi School of Economics in the early 1950s. Later, he attended the Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands. Under the guidance of Professor Jan Tinbergen of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, he was awarded a doctorate in economics there in 1953.

Career

Academic

Mitra taught as a lecturer in economics at the University of Lucknow for two years before proceeding to the Netherlands to complete his PhD thesis. He taught at the UN Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East in Bangkok, Thailand, before returning to Delhi in 1961. He joined the Economic Development Institute in Washington, D.C., as a faculty of economics during the early 1960s. He also worked for the World Bank in the 1960s. In the early-1990s he became the chairman of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.

Political

After returning to India he accepted the professorship in economics at the newly established Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. He was the chief economic adviser and later chairman of the Agricultural Prices Commission, both of the Government of India. He was finance minister of West Bengal from 1977–87. In the mid-1990s he became a member of the Rajya Sabha and was chairman of the Parliament's Standing Committee on Industry and Commerce.

Scholarship

He authored the "Calcutta Diary" in Economic and Political Weekly and "Terms of Trade and Class Relations". He contributed articles regularly to the Calcutta-based national daily newspaper, The Telegraph. He also wrote short stories in Bengali. He was conferred the Sahitya Academi Award in 1996 for his Essays entitled Tal Betal. His publications include China-Issues in Development and From the Ramparts, Prattler's Tale: Recollections of a Contrary Marxist (which has also been published in Bengali as Apila Chapala).

He founded a journal entitled Arek Rakam.

Death and family

Mitra was married to Gouri, who died aged 79 in May 2008. He died on 1 May 2018 at the age of 90. Ashok Mitra is survived by his only sibling, Sreelata Ghosh (née Mitra), sister.

References

1. ^ Deepak Nayyar (1998). Economics as Ideology and Experience: Essays in Honour of Ashok Mitra. Frank Cass. p. xiii. ISBN 0-7146-4723-3.
2. Gupta, Subhrangshu (16 August 2003). "Mitra flays CPM for 'patronising' US capitalists". The Tribune. Retrieved 20 August 2019.
3. "Ashok Mitra (1928-2018): Subversive devil". The Indian Express. 3 May 2018. Retrieved 20 August 2019.
4. "Ashok Mitra bereaved". The Hindu. 3 May 2008. Retrieved 20 August 2019.
5. "Veteran Marxist economist and politician Ashok Mitra, 89, is dead". Business Standard. 1 May 2018. Retrieved 20 August 2019.

Further reading

• Chakravarty, Suhash (19 March 2007). "The Importance of Being Ashok Mitra". Outlook. Retrieved 20 August 2019.

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Secretaries	Economic Affairs Rajiv Mehrishi Shaktikanta Das Subhash Chandra Garg Atanu Chakraborty (incumbent) Revenue Shaktikanta Das Ajay Bhushan Pandey Hasmukh Adhia (incumbent) Finance Ratan P. Watal Ashok Lavasa Hasmukh Adhia Ajay Narayan Jha Rajiv Kumar (incumbent)
Finance ministers	R. K. Shanmukham Chetty John Mathai C. D. Deshmukh T. T. Krishnamachari Jawaharlal Nehru Morarji Desai Sachindra Chaudhuri Indira Gandhi Yashwantrao Chavan Chidambaram Subramaniam Hirubhai M. Patel Charan Singh Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna R. Venkataraman Pranab Mukherjee Vishwanath Pratap Singh Rajiv Gandhi N. D. Tiwari Shankarrao Chavan Madhu Dandavate Yashwant Sinha Manmohan Singh Jaswant Singh P. Chidambaram I. K. Gujral Arun Jaitley Piyush Goyal Nirmala Sitharaman (incumbent)
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Chief Economic Advisor	JJ Anjaria IG Patel IG Patel VK Ramaswamy Ashok Mitra Manmohan Singh RM Honavar Bimal Jalan Nitin Desai Deepak Nayyar Shankar Acharya Rakesh Mohan Ashok K Lahiri Arvind Virmani Kaushik Basu Raghuram Rajan Arvind Subramanian Krishnamurthy Subramanian V. Anantha Nageswaran (incumbent)
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• 1928 births
• 2018 deaths
• Communist Party of India (Marxist) politicians from West Bengal
• Marxian economists
• 20th-century Indian economists
• Indian memoirists
• Scientists from West Bengal
• University of Dhaka alumni
• Banaras Hindu University alumni
• Academic staff of Delhi University
• Academic staff of the University of Calcutta
• Academic staff of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta
• Academic staff of the University of Lucknow
• University of Calcutta alumni
• Rajya Sabha members from West Bengal
• Scholars from West Bengal
• West Bengal MLAs 1977–1982
• West Bengal MLAs 1982–1987
• Chief Economic Advisers to the Government of India
• State cabinet ministers of West Bengal