Research Director and Senior Fellow, Niranjan Rajadhyaksha's tribute to T.N. Srinivasan in Mint. Excerpts below:

"T.N. Srinivasan towered over the field of Indian economics like a colossus. His death in Chennai on Sunday truly marks the end of an era.

Srinivasan, or TN, as he was widely known, initially trained to be a statistician. He studied at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata. An uninspiring stint in Mumbai, doing statistical quality control at the textile mills, led him to write to Tjalling Koopmans at Yale University.

Koopmans, who would later win the 1975 Nobel Prize in economics, took the young Indian under his wing. Under the master, Srinivasan studied operations research and linear programming, skills that were especially important in the age of national planning, when resources were sought to be optimally allocated with minimal recourse to the price system. Srinivasan wrote his doctoral thesis on the choice of techniques. Amartya Sen was grappling with the same issue at the same time at Cambridge University, under the guidance of Joan Robinson."

Read the full article here.