Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee arrives in Kolkata after meeting PM Narendra Modi

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, who won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics (along with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer), called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi this afternoon.

After the meeting, Banerjee said, “The Prime Minister was kind enough to give me quite a lot of time and to talk about his way of thinking about India, which was quite unique because one hears a lot about policies but one rarely hears about the thinking behind it.”
Banerjee also told reporters that the PM jokingly told him that the media was trying to get him to make “anti-Modi” statements. His comment comes under the backdrop of Union Minister Piyush Goyal recently criticising him to be Left-leaning and Banerjee’s comments on Centre’s fiscal policies at a time when India is facing an economic slowdown.
Talking on what the PM discussed and his ideas on governance, Banerjee said, “He talked about the way he sees governance in particular, and why in some sense the mistrust of some people on the ground colours our governance and therefore creates structures of elite control over the governance process, not a responsive government. In that process, I think he very nicely explained how he is trying to reform the bureaucracy in India to make it more responsive, to understand the ways in which people’s views need to be taken into account, to expose them more to the reality on the ground.
Talking on his views about how the governance should be structured in a country like India, Banerjee said, “I think it’s important for India to have a bureaucracy that lives on the ground and gets its stimulus from how life is on the ground and without that we get an unresponsive government. Thank you, PM. That was quite a unique experience for me”.
After the meeting, the PM took to twitter and wrote: “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”.

Later in the afternoon, Banerjee took a flight from Delhi to Kolkata, where he will stay for a day. His mother, Nirmala Banerjee, lives in Ballygunge Circular Road.

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