Abhijit Banerjee

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. ”

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. ”