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Nalini Ranjan Sarkar

(1882 – 1953) – (West Bengal

Nalini Ranjan Sarkar (Aged 71) was born in 1882 in Mymensingh, Bangladesh, to a middle-class Kayastha family. After passing the Entrance Examination from Pogose School, Dhaka in 1902, he joined Jagannath College in Dhaka. Subsequently, he joined the City College, Calcutta, of the University of Calcutta but could not continue his studies due to financial reasons. He arrived in Kolkata penniless and joined the nationalist movement that swept over the country following the Partition of Bengal in 1905.

He enlisted himself as a Congress volunteer and lived in a dingy mess room huddled together with his friends. Often, he had to go without food and for morning tea and snacks, he would go to the houses of his friends and patrons. Courage and fortitude sustained him. He soon came to the notice of Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das, who arranged for him a petty job in Hindustan Cooperative Insurance, of which poet Rabindranath Tagore was the Founder Chairman and Surendranath Tagore was the chief executive.

Sarkar participated in the movement against the partition of Bengal in 1905. In later years, influenced by Gandhi’s ideas of non-violence, he participated in the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1920. In the early 1920s, when C. R. Das and Motilal Nehru founded the Swarajya Party, he joined it and soon became one of its leaders. He was, at the same time, involved with the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee. He was also a member of the Bengal Legislative Council from 1923 to 1930 and again from 1937 to 1946, as well as the Chief Whip of the parliamentary Swarajya Party in Bengal. In the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress in 1928, he acted as the Secretary of the Exhibition organized for the occasion.

He was elected as a Councilor of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation in 1932 and became its Mayor in 1935. Sarkar played a crucial role in the political and economic regeneration of Bengal. He served as the Finance Minister of West Bengal in 1948. The Sarkar Committee Report was instrumental in the subsequent establishment of the four Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) by the Government of India. He passed away on 25 January 1953 in Kolkata, West Bengal, India.