Indrajit Ray

Biography

After obtaining the post-graduate and PhD degrees in economics from Jadavpur University in India, the author served initially as a Consultant (Economics) in a public sector undertaking and then as a Deputy Secretary in a leading chamber of commerce in Calcutta, altogether for about eight years, gaining a direct exposure to industries. His works in this period include Industrial Potential Survey in six districts of West Bengal, and Perspective Plan for Industrial Development in Asansol-Durgapur region and Jhargram belt in West Bengal. In 1988, he switched over to post-graduate teaching and research in the department of commerce at the University of North Bengal dealing mainly with managerial economics, business environment and banking. There he has been teaching for three decades with a break of two years for serving as the First Vice Chancellor in a state university in West Bengal. In the fields of economic history and banking, a number of scholars have successfully completed the PhD programme under his supervision. His main fields of interest are industrial historiography, economic history of Bengal, banking and transport economics with a number of scholarly contributions in international journals. He has two publications in Routledge Explorations in Economic History, (a) Bengal Industries and the British Industrial Revolution (1757-1857), published in 2011, and (b) The Development of Modern Industries in Bengal: Reindustrialisation, 1858-1914, published in 2018.

Education

M.A. (Economics), PhD (Economics)

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

Some important publications are:
1. ‘An Econometric Approach to the Planning of Road development in Developing Countries’, Transport Review, vol. 6, no 3, 1986, pp. 273-286.
2. Road Planning for Economic Development: A case study of North Bengal, Classic Publishing, New Delhi, 1998 (book grant from ICSSR).
3. ‘Cost Efficiency of Universal Banking in India: An analysis of scale and scope efficiency’, Prajnan, vol. 22, no 3, 1993, pp. 155-168.
4. ‘X efficiency Revisited: Its concept and measurement in commercial banking institutions’, Arthvijanana (a journal of Gokhale Institute of Politics and economics), Vol. 44, no. 2, June 2002, pp. 155-168 (Jointly with Sumita Sanyal).
5. ‘Reconstructing nineteenth-century trade routes between Bhutan and Assam: Evidences from British Political Missions’, Journal of Bhutan Studies, Vol. 13, Winter 2005 pp. 1–30, (Jointly with Ratna Sarkar).
6. ‘Shipbuilding in Bengal’, in Helaine Selin (ed.), Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, 3rd edition, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_10261-1, Springer, Berlin and New York, 2015

Personal Interests

Hindu philosophy and Kriya Yoga.

Books