Taking a dig at Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee, Indian academician and a political commentator Madhu Purnima Kishwar on October 15 compared Arvind Kejriwal’s felicitation with Magsaysay Award with his Nobel prize in economics. In a tweet, she said if Ford Foundation can award Kejriwal for filing merely 2000 RTIs, it will be of no wonder if Abhijit Banerjee is awarded with Nobel in economics for ‘baby experiments’ in poverty alleviation in Saudi funded ‘Poverty Action Lab’.
Earlier, Indian-origin Abhijit Banerjee, his wife Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer have jointly won the 2019 Nobel prize in economics for their "experimental approach to alleviating global poverty." The prestigious award was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Monday. "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, which is now a flourishing field of research,” the Nobel committee said in a statement.
Many social media users took to Twitter with their pun intended comments.
Instead of researching about how one got an award, a research about ‘if nationalism is the one movement for all things going awry’ might have been better for Indians.
— Anuradha Khaitan (@khaitananu) October 16, 2019
angoor khatte hain
— dipanshu shekhar (@1983_shekhar) October 15, 2019
Next time I go to Delhi, I’ll bring you a plastic replica of Nobel medal from Stockholm. Aise nahin rote
— Debraj Kumar (@KumarDebraj) October 15, 2019
Banerjee, 58, was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D in 1988. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to his profile on the MIT website.