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Dr. Narasinh Annaji Mujumdar (NAM to his close associates), the renowned economist, passed away on April 6, 2014 at the age of 84. Dr. Mujumdar had a phenomenal career. He completed his Ph.D from the School of Economics, Mumbai University, in 1957. His thesis on 'Some Problems of Underemployment: An Analytical Study of Underemployment in the Agricultural Sector' was lauded by leading economists of the day and was published as his first book. He was awarded the Nuffield Fellowship at Oxford University in 1959.
Early Years in the RBI
On his return to India in 1960, he joined the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) as Research Officer, but his reputation had preceded him and he was much sought after by his seniors. Within a few years of his joining the RBI, he published a pathbreaking paper on 'Monetisation in the Agricultural Sector'.
Soon after the Indo-Chinese war of 1962, Joan Robinson, the doyen economist from Cambridge, on a visit to the RBI, berated the top RBI economists for not stepping up the then 3 per cent growth rate to 6 per cent. Dr. Mujumdar could not take it any longer and he took the floor to explain that it was not a question of 'willing' a higher growth rate but of ensuring adequate supply of...