Background
Bhagwati was born in 1934, into a Gujarati family in Mumbai, then in the Bombay Presidency during the British Raj, and graduated from Sydenham College, Mumbai. He then went with "senior status" to read over two years for the BA in Economics at Cambridge (as did colleague and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen who was at Trinity College) where he was a member of St. John's College, Cambridge and received the degree in 1956. Bhagwati's experience at St John's College joined that of other eminent Indian economists including Sir Partha Dasgupta and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. He received the Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967.Bhagwati is married to Padma Desai, also a Columbia economist and Russia-specialist; they have one daughter. He is brother of P.N. Bhagwati, former Chief Justice of India and also of S.N. Bhagwati, an eminent neurosurgeon. Bhagwati and Desai's joint 1970 OECD study India: Planning for Industrialization was a notable contribution at the time.