Pabitra Kumar Sen

Who is Pabitra Kumar Sen?

Professor Pabitra Kumar Sen was the Khaira Professor of Agriculture, Calcutta University, and founder of the College of Agriculture at Calcutta University in the 1950s. Professor Sen obtained his doctoral degree from the Imperial College in London, England in the 1920s and served as plant physiologist and horticulturist under the British India government during the 1930s in Sabore, Bihar, India. He was invited by Syama Prasad Mookerjee to start the college. He was highly influenced by Gandhi and Tagore and worked on village reconstruction in Santiniketan during the 1940s. He founded Seva-Bharati, at village Kapgari, Midnapur, West Bengal in 1948 as an experiment of applying education to elevate the living conditions of the very poor. Professor Sen started with Kapgari, one of the poorest villages in India, and created schools ranging from nursery school up through research centers. Professor Sen written a research article about several interesting developmental work of the area in a paper titled, "The village situation in India and reorganisation of its agricultural resources: A case study" published in Agricultural Administration, Elsevier.