Indian-American Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, his wife Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer jointly won the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize. They were awarded “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.”

Early Life

Banerjee was born in Calcutta, India to Nirmala Banerjee, a professor of economics at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and Dipak Banerjee, a professor and the head of the Department of Economics at Presidency College, Calcutta.

His early education was in South Point High School. After his schooling, he took admission to the University of Calcutta in Presidency College, Kolkata. He got a B.Sc. degree in economics in 1981. And did his MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1983.

Controversies

He was arrested and jailed in Tihar Jail during a protest after students ‘gheraoed‘ the then Vice-Chancellor PN Srivastava of JNU later he was released on bail and charges were dropped against the students. Later, he went on to obtain a Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard University in 1988. His doctoral thesis topic was “Essays in Information Economics.

words from the Nobel committee

“The research conducted by this year’s Laureates has considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty. In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics. Their theory and approach is now a flourishing field of research,” said the Nobel committee in a statement.

Other Achievements

Banerjee is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2003, Banerjee founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), along with Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan, and he remains one of the lab’s directors.

So far 13 Indians have won the Nobel Prize. While the last Nobel Prize India got was in 2009. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan won the prestigious award in the field of Chemistry.

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