An Encounter With Elinor Ostrom

There are a rare breed of people, even brief encounters with whom can leave your conventional perspective in disarray. It is the sheer force of their intellect and the ability to cut through the miasma of conventional thought that you are habituated to, that does it. Professor Elinor Ostrom was one such person. Prof Ostrom, the only woman to win a Nobel Prize (in 2009) for economics, died earlier today (June 12), leaving behind work that holds clues to saving the world. She was 78.

I met Prof Ostrom in February this year when she was in Delhi to participate in a conference on sustainability. It was very late in the evening. She was delayed by almost an hour by an unscheduled engagement. She told me she had been speaking at various sessions and meeting people since eight in the morning. She looked visibly tired. I asked her if she wanted to do the interview in the morning. That would not be possible because she had to leave in the morning, her escort said. Prof Ostrom said since she had made a commitment to me, she would do the interview right then.

I didn't know then, nor did anyone else present there, that Prof Ostrom had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just a couple of months before. Yet she kept all her commitments, including traveling to India and teaching her students at Indiana University, her home for the past 47 years.

In the 45 minutes that I spent with her, Prof Ostrom talked about her work and how important it was to India at the moment. She said how polycentricity, a concept she had pioneered with her political scientist husband Vincent Ostrom, was the solution for managing India's forests, water and land. Equal measures of community, government and private involvement were necessary to manage the commons in India, she said.

I asked her about her early days at the university. I had read that she had suffered discrimination because she was a woman in a male-dominated academia. She was discouraged from pursuing economics. But she refused to give up. ``I fought them,'' she said with mock anger and an elbow jab in the air. Did it work? ``Well, I have been heading that department for so many years now,'' she said breaking into a wrinkly smile.

The feisty professor's death has robbed the world of an important solution provider to some of the pressing problems of the earth. In fact, Prof Ostrom is likely to be the most missed person when the world meets later this month for the Earth Summit in Rio to discuss how to sustain the planet.

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.