Seminal poverty study wins Banerjee a Nobel

Indian-origin professor, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer get highest honour

NEW DELHI: Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer won the 2019 Nobel prize for economics on Monday for pioneering research into determining what works and what does not in efforts to combat poverty, improve health and expand education programmes.

The three showed how poverty could be addressed by favouring practical steps over theory, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said, crediting their approach for a transformation in development policies.

Banerjee, who was raised in Kolkata but is now a US citizen, becomes only the second person of Indian origin to win the Nobel prize for economics (after Amartya Sen in 1998), and the first since Kailash Satyarthi who won the Peace prize in 2014.

The Nobel prize “reflects on the fact that somehow while we often pay lip service to the welfare of all, this is something that not always [is the] immediate focus of a prize like this,” said Banerjee in an interview to NobelPrize.org.

“It’s wonderful to get this prize. The prize is not for us, but for the entire movement [poverty alleviation]. It’s a movement that we happened to be at the beginning of,” he said at a news briefing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he and Duflo — the two married in 2015 — are professors.

A total of nine people with Indian citizenship or of Indian origin have won a Nobel prize.

“He is very much an Indian. He was reluctant to change his citizenship,” Banerjee’s mother, economist Nirmala Banerjee, told NDTV at the family’s home in Kolkata.

“I knew it was too ambitious to think [that he would win a Nobel] but I had a hunch, especially since he turned his focus on poverty... But I didn’t expect him to win it so early,” she told HT in an interview. Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer will have an equal share in the $918,000 cash award. French-American Duflo at the age of 46 is the youngest ever to win the prize in the field of economics and only the second woman, after Elinor Ostrom in 2009. “Without spending some time understanding the intricacies of the lives of the poor and why they make the choices they make... it is impossible to design the right approach,” Duflo told a news conference.