 I was glad to see at least one of my compatriots among the graduands. That was the one with the kilt in case you hadn't guessed. Chairman, ladies, gentlemen, colleagues, we honour today the intellectual achievement of a remarkable political economist. Over the last four decades and more, he has produced a large corpus of work in which great new insight has been provided into the nature of underdevelopment and development in his own country, India, and more generally. He has done that with a consistent determination to confront social injustice and deeply entrenched poverty, and always with analytical precision and scrupulous scholarship. He is one of the world's outstanding political economists. Prabhat Patnaik was born in Orissa in 1945. Through scholarship, he made brilliant academic progress at St Stephen's College, Delhi, at the Delhi School of Economics, and at Oxford and Cambridge. He obtained his BA and MA degrees in economics in Delhi, and his B-FIL and D-FIL degrees in economics at Oxford. He imbibed the ideas of Marx and was influenced by those of Keynes. As he says himself, when in Delhi he diverted the writings of Morris Dobb, and I know that he came to admire W Arthur Lewis and especially the famous Lewis model with its classical pedigree. He is deeply influenced by Marx, but he is no dogmatist. He has considered and seen the strengths of different systems of thought. He has, however, been a relentless critic of neoclassical economics. He was a member of the Faculty of Economics and Politics and a fellow of Clear College, Cambridge, between 1969 and 1974. Jawaharlal Nehru University had been founded in Delhi in 1969, and in 1974 he joined its newly established Centre for Economic Studies and Planning as an associate professor. He became a professor in 1983. He remained there until his retirement in 2010. His work has been in macroeconomics and in political economy. He has been a potent and illuminating blend of the two, at once technically brilliant, incisive and compelling. That work has been in five main areas. The first is in the macroeconomics of an agriculture constrained economy and a succession of papers, the first of which was published in 1972. The second area is the dynamics of a mixed economy. Many of the papers in these two areas were brought together in his 1995 book, Whatever Happened to Imperialism and Other Essays. That title signals his third area of interest, the theory of imperialism. And here, his brilliant 1997 book, Accumulation and Stability Under Capitalism, is an established classic. Fosley Marxist's theory has attracted his creative attention and he has revisited cogently the famous transformation problem and explored Marx's neglected contribution to monetary theory, which anticipates a good deal of kens. He's done that in his 2009 book, The Value of Money. In the final, the fifth area, he has mounted a formidable critique of neoliberal economic policies and he's advocated a range of measures to reduce poverty directly. In addition to the books I've mentioned, I should point to his Time Inflation and Growth, 1988, Economics and Egalitarianism in 1990, The Retreat to Unfreedom, 2003, and Re-envisioning Socialism, 2011. In each of those five areas, he has made powerful original and lasting contributions. From 2006 to 2011, he was executive head of the Planning Board in the Indian state of Kerala. A post he discharged with distinction and considerable success, presiding over an increase in welfare measures which have been associated with a very healthy growth rate. In 2008, in the wake of the global financial crisis, he was appointed by the President of the United Nations General Assembly to the four-member task force chaired by Joseph Stiglitz, charged with considering the crisis and recommending reforms of the international financial system. He has edited and he continues to edit the monthly journal Social Scientist, which under his editorship has successfully promoted radical ideas and published important research, both theoretical and applied and on both contemporary and historical themes. His work is characterised by clarity, rigor and elegance, which makes it a pleasure to read. Those are enviable qualities. In his case, brought to bear powerfully and with passion upon real issues. His writing is preeminently informed by relevance to real issues, social, political and economic relevance. It's not always that one can say this of economists. In his case, one can say it without qualification. Of all his many qualities, it is this that gives his distinguished scholarship special and enduring force. Chairman, it is my privilege now to ask you to present Professor Prabhat Patnaik for the degree of Doctor of Science, Economics and the DSC ACON and invite him to address the assembly. Dr. Miller, Professor Webley, colleagues, fellow graduands, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, I'd like to congratulate all those who have received their degrees today, my fellow graduands. I'm extremely grateful to the School of Oriental African Studies for conferring on me the honorary degree of DSC ACON. I'm also grateful to Professor Terence Byers for the generous words with which he has introduced me. My association with the SOAS goes back a long way. In fact, one of my books that Professor Byers referred to accumulation, stability and the capitalism was written when I was visiting SOAS in 1990. To be recognized by an institution of such distinction and such cosmopolitan intellectual traditions and one of which I have such fond memories is immensely gratifying. John Maynard Keynes may have exaggerated a little but only a little when he wrote the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are far more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. The obstacles to solving the material problems facing mankind may lie in our social structures characterized by the existence of privileged social groups with entrenched interests. But these interests are legitimized through ideas. The proximate obstacle to material progress of mankind therefore lies in the realm of ideas. Engagement in the struggle over ideas for ushering in a humane society is what makes the profession of an academic economist worthwhile. The importance of the struggle over ideas is greater today than at any time in the recent past. Humankind today faces a twin crisis. One is the crisis of recession and unemployment that began in the developed countries but is now spreading all over the world. The other is the food crisis manifest in the fall over the last three decades in per capita world food-rains production and availability. The first crisis implies that resources lie idle. The second crisis arises because peasants and petty producers over much of the world have inadequate resources. This combination of resource shortage in one segment of the world with resource wastage in another, both productive of human misery, reflects the deep irrationality of our social arrangements. But the very apocalyptic nature of the twin crisis also constitutes a source of hope. An improvement in the social arrangements characterizing the world economy can no longer be deferred. A denomah where all segments of the working people in the world can be made better off than they currently are is not difficult to achieve. What is required is a removal in the realm of ideas, of barriers to the achievement of such a denomah. The degree with which you honor me today gives me great encouragement to do my own bit in the struggle over ideas that is intensifying. Thank you very much.