Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz has put his signature on a petition endorsed by over 300 academics that was earlier sent to President Droupadi Murmu, seeking steps against the Visva-Bharati administration for trying to evict economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen from a parcel of land at Pratichi, his ancestral home in Santiniketan.

The President is also the Visitor to Visva-Bharati.

Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University, is the second Noble laureate to put his weight behind Sen in the recent land controversy. George Akerlof was the first. Stiglitz and Akerlof, along with Michael Spence, had jointly won the Nobel for economics in 2001.

Stiglitz apart, veteran economist Amiya Kumar Bagchi, an emeritus professor at the Institute of Development Studies in Calcutta and an adjunct professor at Monash University in Australia, also signed the petition.

A fresh copy of the petition was sent to PresidentMurmu with the addition of these two signatures on Wednesday, Sudipta Bhattacharyya, the president of the Visva-Bharati University Faculty Association, told this newspaper.

“Over 300 academics, including Nobel laureate economist Akerlof, sent a letter to the President last month seeking action against the central varsity administration and its vice-chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty over continuous harassment of professor Sen. After Stiglitz and Bagchi wished to join the protest, we sent a revised letter (with their signatures) to the President on Wednesday,” Bhattacharyya said.

Visva-Bharati, on April 19 this year, in an eviction notice asked Sen to vacate 13 decimals of Pratichi land.

The varsity threatened to take back the land, which it claimed was under Sen’s “unauthorised occupation”.

Sen’s lawyers approached the court of the Birbhum district judge.

The next hearing of the case is on Friday.