V. M. Dandekar:Social Scientist With a Difference

Vinayak Mahadeo Dandekar, the first Editor of this Journal and the founder President of the Indian School of Political Economy, who died on 30th July, 1995, at the age of 75, was an unusual Indian Economist in many ways. He had no formal university training in economics beyond the undergraduate level. He studied statistics, a new subject in the Indian University set up at the time, in Professor P.C. Mahalanobis's newly fledgling Indian Statistical Institute at Calcutta and took the Master's degree of the Calcutta University with a gold medal. He obtained admission to the Ph.D. programme in statistics of the University of London. But he was one of the large number of Indian students booked by a steamer to London, who walked out of the steamer at Bombay as a protest against the treatment meted out by the Company, and that saw the end of his further formal education and trip abroad for the purpose. He spent a year as a statistician in the Government of Bombay before joining the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics at Pune in its newly established Dorabjee Tata Section in Agricultural Economics. Here began a lifelong association with that Institute, and his career as a researcher in economics.