Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee joined an illustrious list of Indians and persons of Indian origin in winning the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences. It was set up in memory of founder Alfred Nobel in October.

The US-based Banerjee shared the prize with his economist-wife Esther Duflo and another US-based economist Michael Kremer. The Swedish academy announced the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences for the economists’ experimental approach to alleviating global poverty. Banerjee and his co-workers tried to measure the efficacy of actions such as Government programmes in improving people’s lives.

The Mumbai born 58-year-old Banerjee spent his early life in West Bengal, and attended the South Point High School in Kolkata (see box). After graduating from Presidency College, Kolkata, he received his post-graduation degree in economics from New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1983. In 1988, he obtained a PhD in economics from the Harvard University.