Abhijit Banerjee

Early life and education

• Abhijit Banerjee was born on 21 February 1961 in Mumbai, and raised in Kolkata.
• Both his parents were economics professors, so he met the subject early.
• He completed a BSc (Honours) in Economics at Presidency College, Calcutta, in 1981.
• He completed an MA at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, in 1983.
• He earned a PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 1988.

The Nobel Prize

• Banerjee won the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. It was announced on 14 October 2019.
• He shared it with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer.
• The prize recognised their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.

Randomised controlled trials

• He pioneered the use of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in development economics.
• The method is borrowed from clinical drug trials.
• It tests which anti-poverty policies actually work.

J-PAL

• In 2003, he co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).
• His co-founders were Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan.

A Nobel marriage

• He married Esther Duflo, a fellow economist, in 2015.
• Together they became one of the very few married couples to jointly win a Nobel Prize.
• Duflo is the second woman to win the Economics Nobel.

How the RCT method works

• It treats a development policy like a clinical drug trial.
• An intervention is randomly given to some groups and not to others.
• Then the real difference it makes is measured.

Academic career

• He taught at Harvard and Princeton before joining MIT in 1993.
• He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT.
• He has also held a position at the University of Zurich.

Books

• Poor Economics (2011), co-authored with Duflo.
• Good Economics for Hard Times (2019).
• Poor Economics won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2011.

His real contribution

• Banerjee’s real contribution was not caring about poverty. Many people care.
• It was insisting that economists prove which specific interventions reduce it.
• And which ones just sound good.

A different debate from Sen and Bhagwati

• For the wider academic debate on how India should fight poverty, growth-first views offer a useful contrast.
• See Poverty in a Changing India: The Sen-Bhagwati Debate.

A natural testing ground in India

• India’s large anti-poverty employment programmes are a natural testing ground for RCT-style evaluation.
• See MGNREGA and the Viksit Bharat–G RAM G Act for one such programme.
• See Development Issues and Concerns for how India measures and debates development itself.

No direct UPSC question yet

• No UPSC question has directly tested Banerjee’s biography so far.
• But these traps are likely.

Three traps

• Trio trap: the 2019 Economics Nobel was shared three ways, not between the two spouses alone.
• Method trap: his signature method is the RCT. It is different from the capability approach linked to Amartya Sen.
• Institution trap: J-PAL was co-founded by three people in 2003, not by Banerjee alone.

A new book on food and economics

• On 30 May 2025, Banerjee presented his new book, Chhaunk: Food, Economics and Society, at a World Bank event.
• It is part memoir and part cookbook.
• It uses food to explore economic and social themes.

Sharp words on “jobless growth”

• At the Kerala Literature Festival (22–25 January 2026, Kozhikode), he spoke on the economics of food, hunger and welfare.
• He said that obsession with growth rates means almost nothing, since growth has long been disconnected from job creation.
• He also questioned the reliability of India’s growth data, especially for small industries.
• He warned that rising political polarisation was eroding transparency and media freedom.