Quotes from Abhijit Banerjee

Gujarat is a pro-business state, where civil society organisations are comfortable with working to make sure that business does not suffer. Large parts of the rest of India, for better or worse, are very different.

When I was a graduate student, I actually took a course in development economics and I thought it was the most boring thing in the world.

I was trained as an economic theorist; my job at MIT was as an economic theorist. At some level that's still part of my identity.

There is nothing remotely dignified about sorting through rotting trash to find something to feed your child, or asking someone for money because you have none (anyone who has contrived to give people money before they had to ask will never forget the look of gratitude in their eyes).

Mamata Banerjee and Narendra Modi, the ultimate didi and dada of Indian politics, should really commiserate.

The Korean government is the first to declare that if you replace people with machines you have to pay a tax. It's a tax on robots. They make private companies internalise the social cost of unemployment. Social benefit is not the same as private benefit. We have to realise this.

This is why universities, and civil society more generally, are so important for a democracy like ours, founded on a genuine idealism that we have a hard time holding on to. They provide a space to question whatever we are doing in the name of things we say we believe in or might believe in.

I am not partisan in my economic thinking. We work with any number of state governments, many of which are BJP governments.

The BJP must nurture the institutions that put credible checks and balances in place.

Catastrophic health shocks do enormous damage to families both economically and otherwise, and are easy to insure, because nobody gets them on purpose. On the other hand, insurance policies that only treat certain catastrophic illnesses are hard to comprehend, especially of you are illiterate and unused to the legalistic nature of exclusions etc.

Milk production is one of India's great success stories.

The world's poorest people use the cheapest available fuels - dung and twigs and even leaves.