- Lived:
- 2 January 1898 (some references say 1899) – 13 May 1963 · Bengal — Calcutta (Kolkata), the districts, the chief secretary's office of a partitioned province → New Delhi, where the world's largest election was designed
- Field:
- administration — Indian Civil Service, 1921; first Chief Election Commissioner of India, 1950–58; a mathematician by training
- The Big Idea:
- A country where most voters could not read could still vote — if the voting was engineered to fit the voters: a picture-symbol for every candidate, a ballot box for every symbol, indelible ink on every finger, and a calendar built around the Himalayan snows. He designed it, tested it, and delivered it, twice.
- In their words:
- women enrolled only as somebody's wife or somebody's mother were, he ruled, "a curious senseless relic of the past" — the voter's roll would carry her own name or it would not carry her. (quoted in Ramachandra Guha)
- If you remember one thing:
- Universal franchise in illiterate, just-partitioned India was called "the biggest gamble in history." Sukumar Sen was the man who took the gamble out of it — engineered it, ran it, ran it again cheaper, exported it to Sudan — and then retired without writing a single page about how he did it.