"Krishna Bharadwaj was a highly talented economist with many wonderful personal qualities. This combination made her such a rare treasure …
… scholarly dignity was only one of the many wonderful qualities of her personality. Her friends and colleagues would not be able to forget the warmth and generosity of her character. l can remember so many occasions when others have not been generous to her, but I cannot remember a single instance when she retaliated with ungenerosity. She was simply incapable of meanness in any form. Her intellectual excellence was compelling enough. And, combined with rare human qualities, that excellence shone quietly to illuminate many dark patches of our lives—for her circle of friends, for her professional colleagues and for her students."
- Amit Bhaduri,
Economic and Political Weekly, March 7-14, 1992.
"On her return to India in 1971, Krishna spent a year as Visiting Professor at the Delhi School of Economics, at the end of which she moved to the newly established Jawaharlal Nehru University. The loss to the Delhi School of Economics was a gain of great importance to JNU. There was no economics department at JNU at that time and the then Vice-Chancellor, G. Parthasarathy, invited Krishna to join the Centre for Political Studies, which she did in 1972. The decision was taken to set up an economics department with Krishna as the head; she recruited in effect the first five members of the new Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, which started teaching M.A. students from August 1973 with a faculty of six members…
… In the twenty years that she taught and lived at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Krishna Bharadwaj set standards of scholarship and of an ideal model of the teacher-student relationship which others can certainly try to emulate but would have difficulty in surpassing."
- Utsa Patnaik,
Social Scientist, December, 1991.
"For her, in the last two decades or so, the Centre … was the most important focal point of her life. … From 1973 to 1990 was perhaps the most productive period of her life. … At the same time she was involved in every detail of the functioning of the Centre. What the syllabus should be, who should teach what and when, how the syllabus should be altered, the course outlines, the preparation of the handbook of the Centre, some student problem or the other – nothing was too small for her. … She carried … more than a fair share of administrative work – chairmanship of the Centre and deanship of the School of Social Sciences. In addition, she taught as many courses as anyone else … Her courses on the Classical Theories of Value and Distribution, Agricultural Economics and Capital Theory were among the most popular. … Her house at No. 4 Dakshinapuram was always known for being a completely open house for students and colleagues alike and everyone was always very welcome. It is no wonder that she was often referred to as the Mother of the Centre …"
- Anjan Mukherji,
Economic and Political Weekly, March 21, 1992.
