Nobel winner Amartya Sen's daughter denies rumours of his death

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen's daughter on Tuesday denied multiple Indian media reports -- prompted by a viral social media post -- of the economist's death, saying he was "totally fine".

Nandana Sen posted a picture with her father and confirmed the 89-year-old was "busy as ever".

"He is teaching two courses a week at Harvard, working on his gender book", Nandana said on X, previously known as Twitter.

The fake news spread after a recently created account on X named after Claudia Goldin, who on Monday won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics, posted "a terrible news" about Sen's death.

The social media platform was soon flooded with condolence messages from Sen's admirers.

Several mass-circulation Indian media outlets including the Deccan Herald, Times of India and news agency Press Trust of India published reports based on the hoax.

Sen's daughter took to X to deny the reports.

"We just spent a wonderful week together w/ family in Cambridge -- his hug as strong as always last night when we said bye!" she said.

The account that posted the misinformation was taken down soon afterwards.

Harvard professor Sen was the first person from Asia to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, and news of his win in 1998 sent India into jubilation.

Sen -- whose first name means "immortal" in English -- was born into a family of academics in 1933, in what is now the Indian state of West Bengal.

He spent much of his childhood in Dhaka -- now in Bangladesh -- and later studied economics at Cambridge, where he returned more than three decades to serve as master of Trinity College.

His distinguished academic career has also included posts at Oxford and the London School of Economics.

His brazen outspokenness earned him many detractors at home, especially after his trenchant criticisms of rising religious intolerance under the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.