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In a dim Cambridge seminar room in the 1950s, six young scholars from the global South scribbled furiously as the lectures unfurled. The future of global economics may not have known their names yet — Manmohan Singh, Amartya Sen, Mahbub ul Haq, Lal Jayawardane, Jagdish Bhagwati, and Rehman Sobhan — but these students already carried with them something rarer than academic ambition: the weight of newly independent nations and the audacity to imagine a world where poverty could be designed out of existence.
Their stories, braided together in David C. Engerman’s Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made, are reminders that the great battles of our time — for equity, dignity, and economic justice — were once envisioned not just in parliaments or protests, but in the footnotes of theory and the data of deprivation.
Engerman, in conversation with journalist Seema Chishti of The Wire, underscores what makes their journeys remarkable even today. “They weren’t just academics,” he says. “They were dreamers and designers of a different future — one where knowledge had to serve the poor.”
From Theory to Power
India’s economic story is often told in extremes — call center booms and slumdog contrasts. Yet the intellectual legacy that helped frame India’s development lies not in slogans but in sustained vision. As India today navigates global disruptions, technological revolutions, and persistent inequality, these economists’ insistence that growth must have a human face resonates with renewed urgency.
Take Mahbub ul Haq’s pioneering work on the Human Development Index. Designed not to rank GDP but to re-center the individual — in health, education, and dignity — the HDI is today a global standard. Yet it was born of South Asian soil, shaped by a Pakistani economist who watched wealth and wellbeing diverge sharply in his homeland.
Amartya Sen, India’s Nobel laureate in economics, gave philosophical heft to Haq’s ideas. His notion of “capabilities” — that freedom is not just about choice but the ability to choose meaningfully — remains deeply relevant as India expands digital infrastructure and debates the future of welfare. In the face of rising AI and automation, Sen’s voice reminds us that development is not merely a race to produce but a responsibility to empower.
And then there is Manmohan Singh — once a student under Keynesian shadows, later the reformer who opened India’s economy in 1991 with trembling hands and a quiet resolve. His reforms were not just about liberalization. They were a calculated leap toward a more connected world, inspired by the belief that India had earned the right to rise, on its own terms.
A South Asian Consciousness
These thinkers did not always agree. Bhagwati championed free trade, Sobhan emphasized structural inequality, and Jayawardane, from Sri Lanka, warned against blindly copying Western prescriptions. But they shared a bond deeper than ideology — a conviction that the developing world needed its own vocabulary, its own metrics, and its own moral compass.
In the 2020s, as India positions itself as a leader of the Global South, these lessons are not just nostalgic. They’re strategic.
India’s G20 presidency emphasized inclusive growth, debt restructuring for the Global South, and climate finance. While the language may be new, the impulse echoes Singh’s careful pragmatism, Haq’s ethical urgency, and Sen’s enduring humanism.
That India can speak on behalf of many today — and be heard — owes much to the intellectual scaffolding laid by these economists.
Their Time, and Ours
It’s tempting to treat economists as detached technocrats. Engerman’s book shatters that illusion. These were individuals forged in postcolonial turmoil, aware that ideas could liberate or subjugate. Their theories were not just academic; they were acts of resistance, expressions of solidarity.
In a moment when politics often overwhelms policy, and cynicism drowns out vision, their stories offer another possibility: that thinking clearly, and ethically, still matters.
Engerman and Chishti’s conversation is ultimately about memory, and its role in shaping ambition. “They believed poverty was not destiny,” Chishti notes. “That makes them radical, even today.”
In a country that is still writing its future — unevenly, noisily, and ambitiously — perhaps the we can tell is this: that once, from our own midst, came minds who believed not only that the world could be different, but that we could build it. And in some quiet way, perhaps, we still are.
Note: Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made by David C. Engerman was released by Oxford University Press on July 16, 2025, spanning 576 pages. This meticulously researched volume arrives as a timely contribution to contemporary conversations on development, offering both scholarly insight and narrative flair.
