Abhijit Banerjee has been awarded the Economics Nobel Prize along with his wife Esther Duflo and another US academic, for their research on how to alleviate poverty that has helped education of the poor in India and also revolutionized the field of development economics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (RSAS) announced on October 14, 2019.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Banerjee, an alumnus of Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Calcutta, is the second person of Indian Origin to be awarded the prize after Amartya Sen who received it in 1988. He is the tenth person of Indian origin or citizenship to win a Nobel. Banerjee’s work encompasses a broad area in India from using in iron-fortified salt to fight anaemia in Bihar and education in West Bengal to e-governance in dealing with programme leakages and police reform in Rajasthan. Announcing the prize in Stockholm, RSAS Secretary-General Goran Hansson said Banejee, France-born Duflo and Harvard professor Michael Kremer were being honoured for “their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.”