Professor Amartya Sen receives the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1998 from His Majesty, Harald V, the King of Norway

When the Nobel award came my way, it also gave me an opportunity to do something immediate and practical about my old obsessions, including literacy, basic health care and gender equity, aimed specifically at India and Bangladesh. The Pratichi Trust, which I have set up with the help of some of the prize money, is, of course, a small effort compared with the magnitude of these problems. But it is nice to re-experience something of the old excitement of running evening schools, more than fifty years ago, in villages near Santiniketan.