"Social choice theory related importantly to a more widespread interest in aggregation in economic assessment and policy making (related to poverty, inequality, unemployment, real national income, living standards)" as said by Amartya Sen. Social choice theory studies voting rules for how individual preferences are aggregated to form a collective preference. Sen`s contribution to the literature enrich the theory of social choice. Sen points that there are a number of social and economic factors, such as declining wages, unemployment, rising food prices, and poor food-distribution systems etc behind the issues which led to starvation among certain groups in society. Sen`s revolutionary contribution to development economics and social indicators is the concept of `capability` which is a conceptual frame work for evaluating social states in terms of human welfare. He argues that governments should measure the concrete capabilities of their citizens. This is because top-down development will always trump human rights as long as the definition of terms remains in doubt.

Amartya Kumar Sen, an Indian economist and a winner of the Nobel Prize was born on 3rd November 1933 in Santiniketan, Westbengal. Santiniketan the University town established by the poet Rabindranath Tagore, another Indian Nobel Prize winner. His ancestral home was in Wari, Dhaka in modern-day Bangladesh. His family migrated to India following partition in 1947. Rabindranath Tagore is said to have given Amartya Sen his name "Amartya" meaning "immortal". Sen`s maternal grandfather Ksitimohan Sen was a renowned scholar of medieval Indian literature. Amartya Sen was born to professor father Ashutosh Sen, who taught Chemistry at Dhaka University and mother Amita Sen. Indian writer and scholar Nabaneeta Dev Sen was his first wife with whom he had two children Antara and Nandana. Antara is renowend Indian journalist and Nandana is a bollywood actress. But their marriage broke up after they moved to London in 1971. Eva Colorni was his second wife with whom he had two children, Indrani and Kabir. Indrani is a journalist in New York and Kabir teaches P.E in the Boston area. Eva died from stomach cancer in 1985. An economic historian, an expert on Adam smith and Fellow of King`s College, Cambridge The Hon. Emma Georgina Rothschild is his present wife. St Gregory`s School in Dhaka in modern-day Bangladesh was Amartya Sen`s high-school. Before moving to Trinity College, Cambridge Sen studied in India at the school system of Visva-Bharati University and Presidency College, Kolkata, where he earned a First Class BA in 1953. At Trinity College he received B.A in 1956 and then a Ph.D. in 1959. He was also allowed four years to immerse himself in philosophical issues during his stay at Trinity College.

He has taught economics at University of Calcutta, Jadavpur University, Delhi, Oxford where he was first a Professor of Economics at Nuffield College and then the Drummond Professor of Political Economy and a Fellow of All Souls College, London School of Economics, Harvard and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1998 to 2004. In January 2004 Sen returned to Harvard. He is also a contributor to the Eva Colorni Trust at the former London Guildhall University.

Amartya Sen in 1998 for his work on famine, human development theory, welfare economics, the underlying mechanisms of poverty and political liberalism won the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences i.e. Nobel Prize for Economics. He became the first Asian academic to head an Oxbridge college. Among his many contributions to development economics, Sen has produced work on gender inequality. He is currently the Lamont University Professor at Harvard University. Amartya Sen`s books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He is a trustee of the Economists for Peace and Security.

The theory of social choice has been developed with Amartya Sen`s contribution. The theory came into prominence with the thoughts of Kenneth Arrow, the American economist. Sen`s contribution was to reveal the condition under which Arrow`s Impossibility Theorem (the theorem demonstrates that no voting system based on ranked preferences can possibly meet a certain set of reasonable criteria when there are three or more options to choose from) come to pass as well as to extend and enrich the theory.

"Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation" is a book published by Amartya Sen in 1981, where he demonstrated that famine occurs not only from a lack of food, but from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing food. His interest in famine came from his personal experience as he witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943. in his book he has shown that in many cases of famine, food supplies were not significantly reduced. In case of Bengal, food production was higher in that year than in previous non-famine years. A number of social and economic factors came into play which led to starvation among certain groups in society. His `capabilities approach` focuses on positive freedom (a person`s actual ability to be or do something) rather than on negative freedom approaches, which are common in economics and simply focuses on non-interference. In the Bengal famine, rural laborers` negative freedom to buy food was not affected. However, they still starved because they were not positively free to do anything.

In the field of development economics Sen`s work has had considerable influence in the formulation of the Human Development Report, published by the United Nations Development Programme. The report ranks countries on a variety of economic and social indicators.

Concept of `Capability` through his article "Equality of What" has been the revolutionary contribution to the development economics and social indicators. To him it is up to the individual society to make the list of minimum capabilities guaranteed by that society.

A controversial article in the New York Review of Books "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing" written by him analysed the mortality impact of unequal rights between the genders in the developing world, particularly Asia.

There is no question that his work helped to re-prioritize a significant sector of economists and development workers even the policies of the United Nations with his peripheral line of thinking.

Amartya Sen devoted his career to evaluate economic policies in terms of their effects on the well-being of the community, which was called the "conscience of his profession". His influential monograph "Collective Choice and Social Welfare" (1970) addressed problems related to as individual rights, justice and equity and majority rule. Sen contrived the methods of measuring poverty that yielded useful information for improving economic conditions for the poor. For example, his theoretical work on inequality provided an explanation for why `there are fewer women than men in India and China in spite of the fact that in the West, and also in poor but medically unbiased countries, women have lower mortality rates at all ages, live longer, and make a slight majority of the population`.

Governments and international organizations were influenced by Sen`s work inorder to handle food crises. His views encouraged policy makers to pay attention not only to lighten immediate suffering but also to finding ways to replace the lost income of the poor, as, for example, through public-works projects, and to maintain stable prices for food. In order to achieve economic growth he argued, social reforms, such as improvements in education and public health, must precede economic reform. Often Sen is criticized as an anti-market proponent by some economists. Sen also denied the claim that he supports anti-globalization views. Srinavasan, an economics professor at Yale and a long time colleague says "many of us were trained in the fifties to believe that states should be active in planning the economy. Sen did not give up that idea until later than some others."

In 1999 he received honorary citizenship of Bangladesh from Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in recognition of his achievements in winning the Nobel Prize, and given that his family origins were in what has become the modern state of Bangladesh. He received the Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award in India in the same year. In the year 2000 he received Leontief Prize for his outstanding contribution to economic theory from the Global Development and Environment Institute. In 2002 he received the International Humanist Award from the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Eisenhower Medal, for Leadership and Service USA in 2000 and Companion of Honour, UK in 2000 also received by him. In 2003, he was conferred the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Indian Chamber of Commerce and Life Time Achievement award by Bangkok-based United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) Amartya Sen has been criticized for his writings outside of Economics, especially for his views on the history of Islam and Jihad, by Fouad Ajami in The Washington Post and by Islam critic Ibn Warraq. Ibn Warraq claimed that Amartya Sen is misrepresenting Islamic history.

He was exposed early on to the unfortunate condition of the poor. As a 10-year old child, during the Bengal famine he was shocked to see the people dying of hunger on the streets of Calcutta away from shops stocked with food. This traumatic incident influenced Amartya Sen unyielding study of the economic mechanism underlying famines and poverty.