Rehman Sobhan

Rehman Sobhan (Bengali: রেহমান সোবহান) is a prominent Bangladeshi economist and leading public intellectual. He played a lead role in the Bengali nationalist movement in the 1960s. He was one of the co-authors of the so-called Two Economies Theory and helped draft Six point demands of Bengali nationalists. He also served in the first Planning Commission in Bangladesh and was a close associate of Bangladesh's founding leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Presently, Rehman Sobhan heads the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), a public policy think-tank, considered to be a leading non-governmental research organization in the developing world.

Education and career

Rehman Sobhan attended St. Paul's School, Darjeeling in India, he went on to Cambridge University to do his bachelor's degree. Subsequently, he went to London School of Economics for a doctoral degree in economics but returned without the degree. He taught Economics at the University of Dhaka. After liberation of Bangladesh in 1971, Rehman Sobhan was appointed a member of the Planning Commission. He quit when he, along with others, fell from the grace of Sheikh Mujib in 1975. Later he worked as the Director General of Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies. After retirement from BIDS, he set up Centre for Policy Dialoguein 1993 , a high-profile private sector think-tank , where he works as its Executive Chairman .

Pre-independence Contributions

In 1960s, Professor Sobhan, under the intellectual leadership of Nurul Islam and other nationalist economists, contributed to the drafting of six-points programme that became the basis for the struggle for autonomy in the then East Pakistan. The writings of this group of economists on regional disparity between West Pakistan (Pakistan since 1971) and East Pakistan (Bangladesh since 1971) played an important role in fomenting nationalist aspirations of the people of Bangladesh. During the liberation war from 26 March to 16 December 1971), he was a roving ambassador for Bangladesh and lobbied in the United States.

Post-independence activities

After the independence of Bangladesh he was appointed a member of the Planning Commission in 1972. He left the country after he was asked to quit. Upon his return to Bangladesh in 1982, he joined Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS) and later he founded the Centre for Policy Dialogue. Currently he is the chairman of CPD, which is active in open public discussions of policy issues, particularly in the area of governance. He has authored numerous books and articles on various developmental issues. many of which appeared in leading national media. He was appointed an advisor of the Caretaker Government in Bangladesh in 1990-91.

Trivia

Professor Sobhan's cohorts at Cambridge included prominent economists of the Indian subcontinent such as Amartya Sen, Manmohan Singh, and Mahbub ul Haq. Sobhan continues to play an active role in the civil society movement in South Asia.

Family

He was married to Salma Sobhan who was a Barrister and a human rights activist, who died in 2003. He is currently married to Dr. Rownaq Jahan, a political scientist, a Distiguished Fellow at CPD. Rehman Sobhan's father Khondker Fazle Sobhan served as Pakistan's ambassador to Kenya. Rehman Sobhan's younger brother, Farooq Sobhan, is a former diplomat and the current President of Bangladesh Enterprise Institute, a private-sector think tank of the country.

Awards

Rehman Sobhan was awarded the Indepence Award, the highest state award of Bangladesh in 2008. The citation said that the award was being given in recognition of his glorious and excellent contribution to research and training.

Publications

• Basic Democracies, Works Programme and Rural Development in East Pakistan (1968),
• Public Enterprise in an Intermediate Regime: A Study in the Political Economy of Bangladesh (1980).
• The Crisis of External Dependence: The Political Economy of Foreign Aid to Bangladesh (1982),
• Public Enterprise and the Nature of the State (1983),
• Rural Poverty and Agrarian Reform in the Philippines (1983),
• From Aid Dependence to Self-Reliance: Development Options for Bangladesh (1990),
• Debt Default and the Crisis of State Sponsored Entrepreneurship in Bangladesh (1991),
• Public Allocative Strategies, Rural Development and Poverty Alleviation : A Global Perspective (1991),
• Planning and Public Action for Asian Women (1992),
• Rethinking the Role of the State in Development : Asian Perspectives (1993),
• Bangladesh : Problems of Governance (1993),
• Agrarian Reform and Social Transformation (1993),
• Aid Dependence and Donor Policy: The Case of Tanzania (1996),
• Towards a Theory of Governance and Development: Learning from East Asia (1998),
• Team leader and Editor of the annual Independent Review of Bangladesh's Development: Experiences with Economic Reform (1995),
• Growth or Stagnation? A Review of Bangladesh's Development (1996),
• Crisis in Governance:Review of Bangladesh's Development (1997),
• Trends in the Post-Flood Economy:Review of Bangladesh's Development (2000).