Abhijit Banerjee

In terms of being a professional, I want to be professional with everyone.

When I was a graduate student, I actually took a course in development economics and I thought it was the most boring thing in the world.

To insist that no one can support the interests of the aam aadmi without being one himself is like saying that no man can support women's rights.

So, I went to Harvard and I got exposed to American work habits. I didn't even realise for a while that I was behind. I kind of had the illusion that I was understanding things. But people worked so hard and the thing I learnt first in America was that people work incredibly hard.

Most farmers know that their children's future will probably not be in agriculture, but they have a hard time imagining a different life.

The first time I went to the Planning Commission was when it was under KC Pant, a long time ago. Since then I have been back there many, many times to the point where the many people who seem to spend their lives sitting outside the various offices and even the patches of grime in the hallways and stairwells began to look familiar.

Every nation necessarily inhabits a morally compromised space. All too often our ideals seem to be held to ransom by what we believe, rightly or wrongly, to be objective reality.

The BJP must nurture the institutions that put credible checks and balances in place.

A universal cash transfer in the form of a minimum guaranteed income would mean that automatically everyone has something to fall back on without having to deal with the vagaries of their local panchayat.

Mass protests often get books or films banned, but very few people take to the streets to challenge the right of the State to decide what we can read or watch - it's still someone else's problem.

This is why universities, and civil society more generally, are so important for a democracy like ours, founded on a genuine idealism that we have a hard time holding on to. They provide a space to question whatever we are doing in the name of things we say we believe in or might believe in.

If democracy as we know it has to survive the elites have to regain their credibility. And they have to start by admitting that their economic model is broken.