as P.N. Dhar and Sukhomoy Chakravarty build an alliance with the nascent state of Bangladesh. Later in the 1970s, he worked in Commerce Ministry under then Commerce Minister, Pranab Mukherjee. In his stint at the Prime Minister's Office in the early 1980s, Sengupta was reportedly unhappy about India's 1982 loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and wanted more to be done for agriculture and small farmers. At this time, he also steered two important groups: the Narsimhan Committee, which created the architecture of disbanding quantitative controls and replacing them with tariff and fiscal steps, and also the Sengupta Committee on public sector reform. Sengupta was a proponent of the need for an arms-length relationship with the political authority in public sector units (PSUs). However, while Sengupta was a market reformer, his vision was different than what was in currency at the time in the international financial institutions. Yoginder Alagh, a former Union Minister and Sengupta's longtime colleague and friend, said that the reforms championed by Sengupta at the time "were our own, not big bang IMF/World Bank reform initiatives." Upon his return to India in 1993 (from the US, where he was with the IMF, and Brussels, where he was posted as India's Ambassador to the EC), Sengupta was appointed Member Secretary of the Planning Commission, under then Deputy chairman, Pranab Mukherjee. According to veteran journalist Rajesh Mahapatra, Mukherjee had become the rallying point for those in the Congress party that were critical of the market reform policies of then Finance Minister, Manmohan Singh. As Member Secretary of the Planning Commission, Sengupta brought together a group of left-wing economists to prepare a critical mid-term appraisal that highlighted the downside of economic liberalisation. With this act, Mahapatra said, "Sengupta ended up on the wrong side of history. The finance ministry prevailed over Prime Minister Narasimha Rao to stop the mid-term appraisal from being printed in its original form." In the same article, Mahapatra alleges that Sengupta was subsequently denied many posts for which he was a candidate, including Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, which went to Dr. Bimal Jalan in 1997, and Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, which went to Dr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia in 2004. Another veteran journalist and TV personality, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, remembered Sengupta in a similar fashion. According to Guha Thakurta, Sengupta's critical stance towards "the neo-liberal school of economic thought subscribed to