What Nobel Laureate Abhijit Banerjee Said After Meeting PM Modi

Nobel Laureate Abhijit Banerjee who met PM Modi on Tuesday said the Prime Minister talked about his way of thinking about India. After the meeting, the Prime Minister took to Twitter and posted the photo of the meeting. “Excellent meeting with Nobel Laureate Abhijit Banerjee. His passion towards human empowerment is clearly visible. We had a healthy and extensive interaction on various subjects. India is proud of his accomplishments. Wishing him the very best for his future endeavours,” the Prime Minister said.

"The PM was kind enough to give me quite a lot of time and to talk a lot about his way of thinking about India, which was quite unique. Because one hears about policies but one rarely hears about the thinking behind them," NDTV quoted Abhijit Banerjee as saying.

"He talked about the way he sees governance in particular. And why maybe the mistrust of the people on the ground colours our governance... And how it therefore creates structure of elite control over the governance process, (which is) not a responsive government. In that process, he very nicely explained how he's trying to reform the bureaucracy to make it more responsive, to understand ways in which people's views need to be taken into account and to expose them to reality on the ground. It is important for India that we have a bureaucracy that lives on the ground," the economist said according to NDTV.

Who is Abhijit Banerjee?

Banerjee, 58 was born in West Bengal. He educated from University of Calcutta and was also an alumni of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). He also went to Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D in 1988. According to his profile on the MIT website, Banerjee is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 2003, Banerjee had founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), along with his student Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan.  Banerjee also served on the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. He started dating Duflo and had his first child with her in 2012. He later married to her in 2015.