The
Delhi School of Economics began in 1949 when a group of visionaries
led by Professor V.K.R.V. Rao and supported by India's first Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru, launched a project to create a centre for advanced
studies in the social sciences. The School comprises the departments
of economics, geography and sociology. In 1993, the Centre for Development
Economics was created within the department, to strengthen the research
infrastructure.
The Delhi School counts numerous outstanding individuals in its list
of alumni and former faculty; Amartya Sen (Nobel Laureate), Pranab Bardhan,
Jagdish Bhagwati and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to name just a few.
The department continues to produce high quality academic research –
in the last couple of years, faculty had publications or acceptances
in many ranking journals. The department has been associated with several
important journals over the years. At present, it publishes the Indian
Economic Review. Faculty members also continue to influence national
debates and policy, through writings in popular journals, production
of two well-regarded economic forecasts, and memberships of national
committees.
We have active seminar and workshop series as well as visiting programmes.
Recent seminar speakers include Professors Oliver Hart (Harvard), Hugo
Sonnenschein (Chicago), Abhijit V. Banerjee (MIT) and Arvind Subramanian
(IMF). Professors Eric Maskin (Princeton) and Debraj Ray (NYU) will
lecture at an the upcoming Winter School in December, 2007. Professor
Bhaskar Dutta (Warwick) will visit the Delhi School in the July-November
2007 academic session.
The department supports M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. programmes. The two
year M.A. course, with its large student enrolment, is the mainstay
of the teaching programme. It places emphasis on quantitative methods,
state-of-the-art economics, and hands-on training in the use of econometric
software. The department has been very successful in placing its Master’s
graduates in corporate jobs as well as in top Ph.D. programmes.
The computer centre that facilitates the department’s programmes
has teaching and research labs equipped with some of the best software
for doing econometrics as well as numerical and symbolic programming
(including STATA, EVIEWS, GAUSS, MATHEMATICA). Students also have high
speed access to the internet.
Complementing the other resources is the Ratan Tata Library, considered
to be the best library for economics in the country. It has a total
collection of over 300,000 books, subscribes to some 500 journals, annual
reports of 800 joint-stock companies, and numerous publications of the
UN and other international agencies.