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Mr Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is an Indian origin economist who is famous for working and improving the situation of poverty at global level. He won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2019 for his work on “experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” His work discussed the field experiments as an important methodology to discover its relationships in economics. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences is officially known as Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. It is a prize for contribution in economics by the Nobel Foundation. Although it is not that which were established by Alfred Nobel’s will in 1895. It is generally referred as the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Mr Abhijit Banerjee shares this Prize with his wife Esther Duflo (Second Wife to which he get married in 2015,) along with Michael Kremer – a French-American. His book co-authored with his wife Esther Duflo “Poor Economics” details much more about their work. He has written numerous books such as Poverty Action Lab. His new book written with his second wife Esther Duflo “Good Economics for Hard Times” was released in October 2019 by Juggernaut Books. Currently he is Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was born on 21 February 1961 in Parbhani district in Maharashtra, earlier known as Prabhavatinagar – one of the eight districts in the Marathawada region of Maharashtra.
He studied in Kolkata and Delhi and later obtained the citizenship of United States. Mr Abhijit Banarjee was belonging to an elite family, his father, Dr Dipak Banerjee (was PhD in economics from the London School of Economics) was a professor of economics at Presidency College, Calcutta, and his mother Mrs Nirmala Banerjee was also a professor of economics at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Mr Abhijit Banerjee’s early education and schooling was held from South Point High School, Calcutta. And he did BSc (H) from Presidency College – now University of Calcutta – an autonomous university. Later, he did M.A. in economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi in 1983. He also obtained a PhD for his research work “Essays in Information Economics” from Harvard University in 1988. During his study at JNU he was once arrested as a student leader because he was protesting against Vice Chancellor.
There are numerous awards and accolades to his name such as an elected fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004, Infosys Prize of economics in 2009 in social sciences category, Bernhard-Harms-Prize from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in 2014. Besides numerous lectures and in various conferences he was much appreciated. He was awarded the Doctor of Letters by the University of Calcutta in January 2020. His work for which he was awarded with the Economics Nobel For Year 2019 try to measure the effectiveness of government program or institution initiatives in improving people’s lives by having random controlled trials similar to clinical trials for authentication of medicine, vaccine or any other procedure in medical research. His study also determined that many mothers were not bringing their children for polio vaccination in certain parts of the country despite it was freely available in India. Later the government made necessary changes in working and awareness creation to increase the effectiveness of vaccination drive.
Mr Banerjee and Prof. Esther Duflo’s study and example set by an experiment in Rajasthan that mothers were gifted a bag of pulse who were getting vaccinated their children helped the immunization rate to increase significantly in the region. This experiment guided the government and institutions to improve the functioning in different initiative taken by them. With this method the learning outcome improved in school when the specially needed students were provided teaching assistants to help them.
The Nobel Committee had said that the award winners concluded that students appeared to learn nothing from additional days at school. In the Indian context they studied the attendance of children in school in Vadodara and found that only 20% third-grade students could correctly answer the first-grade math’s questions. To improve school quality they recommended complimenting to get more children into school. Mr Banerjee is active in all aspects of the society. He remains in news these days complimenting and criticizing with his statement.
On covid situation he advocated to increase the spending. After the second wave of covid appeared in India the newspapers headlines for him read as, India’s Covid-19 problem is now the world’s problem, Leaders and scientists need to figure out what should be done to combat variants of the virus, etc. Besides, on different issues he said the Elitist mindset behind India’s learning poverty. There is evidence to show that enough people don’t know about the benefits of education, India among worst-performing economies; stimulus lacking.
He, however, said that the country will see a revival in growth in the July-September quarter last year that was right and the market begin to move ahead from this date. The revival was faster till the second wave of covid hit the country from April 2021. He was not much confident that India will gain or lose, if businesses shift from China, when the prime Minister of India announced the AATMANIRBHAR BHARAT ABHIYAN last year. He was the person behind handing out temporary ration cards, money to the poor and temporary ration cards, a bigger stimulus package after covid pandemic to support the poor and who lost their jobs.
He and his team found out that most of the farmers could not save money despite of having such observation that the savings can help in future but they can’t control spending because they have to buy fertilizers during cope seasons. Besides, they have to spending on their daily needs for medical treatment, clothes, etc. Some of the farmer work smartly and buy fertilizers right at the end of harvest season and eliminated the need to save altogether. These are some facts that helped them to get the prize for looking up at poverty and the process adoption helped thousands of people to live better lives.
