Workers Response to Minimum Wages

Krishna Bharadwaj POST-INDEPENDENT India has pro- duced two types of economic scholars of international distinction. The first type consisting among others of A K Sen, Jagdish Bhagwati, T N Srinivasan, Avinash Dixit, Prasanta Patnaik have made their names in extensions of traditional, mainstream, economic theory in a number of new lines. The second type courageously went off the beaten, charted track and established their reputations for contributions at the highest levels to abstract economic theory. The late Krishna Bharadwaj belonged to the second category. Cast in the mould of Joan Robinson, at a young age itself, Krishna Bharadwaj (nee Krishna Chandavarkar) made a mark for herself in creative interpretations of the Sraffa rehabilitations of classical economics. She later became an intimate disciple of Sraffa himself who seems to have treated her as his own daughter. Sraffa made her one of the literary executors of his unpublished writings. Krishna Bharadwaj won foremost international reputation for herself as the propounder of the Surplus' approach to the pure theory of economics. Her writings, all of which have attracted world attention, ranged over classical political economy, dualistic model of the Indian economy, production conditions in Indian agriculture, critique of Hirshman's linkage concept, etc. Some time before she passed away she gave a seminal address to the Indian Economic Association on the labouristic approach to economic analysis, an address full of great theoretical insights. During her closing days she had veered towards the C Indhian, self-sharing and self-participatory, type activist approach to the solution of the myriad micro-level economic maladies of India particularly at the level of the disadvantaged rural population. In her untimely death the world of economics has lost a gem of the purest ray serene in the very difficult and abstruse world of economic theory. Her career is a great tribute to Indian womanhood in that her humble, self-effacing, pleasant and gentle exterior concealed her great will to heroically over- come sufferings from a deep tragedy in her personal life.