Abhijit Banerjee

The problem of getting from home to the metro, BRT or bus stop makes many people take their cars to work. Why not start a fleet of electric buses that just circle through neighbourhoods connecting them to the various public transport hubs?

We need to learn to work with political systems that are not perfect instead of taking the view: let's first fix the politics, then we'll fix the rest.

The degree of political pressure to make MGNREGA jobs available varies massively from state to state - which is why access to MGNREGA jobs is worse in a very poor state like Bihar than in a richer state like Andhra Pradesh.

Public conversations about who we are and who we want to be are key to the vitality of our democracy, and leaders can seed those conversations when they speak out their own views.

The tragedy of the UPA is not that it didn't do anything, but that it is not able to take credit for what it has done. By staying silent when it should have been shouting from the rooftop and by protecting the guilty, it surrendered the governance agenda to AAP.

If democracy is to be an articulation of mutual respect, a leader in a democracy leads by showing respect to all.

I was trained as an economic theorist; my job at MIT was as an economic theorist. At some level that's still part of my identity.

Partly, identity politics is a result of economic failure.

My guess is that while the elites would like cleaner air, they are not willing to give up the convenience of being able to use their cars at will to get it, perhaps because they believe (I suspect incorrectly) that they can protect themselves from the consequences of vehicular pollution by investing in air-conditioners and air purifiers.

Independence day is an interesting time to reflect on our strange fealty to institutions that the British left us, including those that were explicitly set up to be used against us.

If PM-Kisan is implemented well, it will leave some money in the hands of poor farmers.

The AAP from the beginning made it clear that they were about changing policy and not being a symbol of purity in a corrupt world.