Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, who won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics (along with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer) will be in Kolkata tomorrow. His mother Nirmala Banerjee lives in Kolkata’s Ballygunge Circular Road. Banerjee was born in Mumbai and spent his childhood in Kolkata. He studied in South Point School and at Presidency College.
Banerjee landed in India on Friday night and is in New Delhi for the past two days. He is scheduled to call on Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday. He visited his alma mater Jawaharlal Nehru University on Saturday, played table tennis, interacted with students and visited Brahmaputra Hostel, where he stayed during his years at the university.
He recalled his days in JNU, where Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and psephologist Yogendra Yadav studied around the same time. Speaking of Sitharaman, Banerjee said that they shared similar views on various issues and their opinions were never in sharp contrast. Banerjee told journalists that he was not just critical of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government, but had also been critical of the earlier government.
Responding to Union Minister Piyush Goyal’s recent remark which said that Banerjee is clearly Left-leaning, which may have affected his thinking while advising Congress on the NYAY (Nyuntam Aay Yojona ) scheme, Banerjee told NDTV that he was a professional and would have happily helped the BJP government on any scheme, had the party approached him.
Speaking to News 18, Banerjee said that Narendra Modi was definitely popular among people but the people of India had selected Modi to the Prime Minister’s seat because they didn’t have better choices. He referred to Modi as a “whole package”. Banerjee said that the NYAY scheme was not well-designed but also mentioned that his role in it was only limited to providing the numbers. He went on to say that India needs a stronger opposition at the Centre, mentioning that Congress needs a more powerful president if they want to emerge as a worthy opposition.
Referring to Sitharaman’s recent move of slashing corporate tax, he said that the move was a wrong one because it was important to ensure that money is put in the hands of poor especially at a time when India is facing an economic slowdown.
However, he did speak well of Central government schemes like Jan Dhan, Ayushman Bharat, and Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana.
Addressing India’s ongoing economic slowdown, he said that it was the result of a combination of things like stress in agriculture and the hastily-introduced goods and services tax. He has also praised Central initiatives like PM Kisan to counter the fall in support prices.
Banerjee told Quint in an interview that the data which scares him the most about India’s current economic situation is that, its average consumption has fallen sharply from the 2014-15 index, which is unprcedented in 30 years.
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