Page 33 - 31OCT2019E

Finding way to fight poverty

helps Indian bag Nobel prize

Research on alleviating global poverty gets India born economist still subsist on extremely low incomes.
Every year, around five million children
Abhijit Banerjee Nobel Prize, reports shveta mishra
under the age of five still die of diseases
that could often have been prevented or
ndian-American Abhijit Banerjee, along with Duflo and Sendhil Mullaina- cured with inexpensive treatments. Half
Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer than, and he remains one of the lab’s of the world’s children still leave school
have jointly won the 2019 Nobel directors. He also served on the UN without basic literacy and numeracy
Economics Prize “for their experi- Secretary-General’s High-level Panel skills.
I mental approach to alleviating of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Abhijit Banerjee with Esther Duflo
global poverty.” Banerjee, 58, was edu- Development Agenda. and Michael Kremer have introduced a
cated at the University of Calcutta, Jawa- The research conducted by Abhijit new approach to obtain reliable answers
harlal Nehru University and Harvard Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael about the best ways to fight global pov-
University, where he received his Ph.D in Kremer has considerably improved the erty. It involves dividing this issue into
1988. He is currently the Ford Foundation ability to fight global poverty. In just two smaller, more manageable, questions
International Professor of Economics at decades, their new experiment-based — for example, the most effective inter-
the Massachusetts Institute of Technol- approach has transformed development ventions for improving educational out-
ogy, according to his profile on the MIT economics, which is now a flourishing comes or child health. They have shown
website. field of research. that these smaller, more precise, ques-
In 2003, Banerjee founded the Abdul According to the release by Nobel tions are often best answered via care-
Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), Prize, more than 700 million people fully designed experiments among the