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Indian-American Abhijit Banerjee has won the Nobel Prize for Economics, joining the list of Indians and people of Indian origin to grab the world’s most prestigious award in different fields. Banerjee along with his wife Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer jointly won the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted his congratulations
Congratulations to Abhijit Banerjee on being conferred the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. He has made notable contributions in the field of poverty alleviation.
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) October 14, 2019
I also congratulate Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for wining the prestigious Nobel.
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) October 14, 2019
Banerjee shared the award with French-American Esther Duflo and another American economist Michael Kremer for their “experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.”
Born in Mumbai, the 58-year-old economist is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the US-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He studied at the University of Calcutta and Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University before receiving his PhD in 1988 from Harvard University.
Banerjee joins the list of Indians and people of Indian origin who have received the prestigious Nobel prize in fields like Physics, Chemistry, Peace, Economic Sciences and Medicine.
Rabindranath Tagore was the first Indian to win the coveted prize for Literature in 1913 “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West”.
C V Raman won the prize for Physics in 1930 “for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him.”
Indian-American Har Gobind Khorana won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 along with two others for their “interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis.”
Mother Teresa, a Roman Catholic nun of Albanian origin and Indian citizenship who founded ‘The Missionaries of Charity’ was awarded the Peace Nobel in 1979 in recognition of her “work in bringing help to suffering humanity”.
Indian-American Subramanyan Chandrasekhar won the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics with William A. Fowler for “theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars.
The Nobel for Economic Sciences in 1998 was won by Kolkata-born economist Amartya Sen “for his contributions to welfare economics.”
India-born Venkatraman Ramakrishnan won the 2009 Nobel Prize along with two others in Chemistry “for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome.”
Sixty-year-old Kailash Satyarthi shared the Nobel Peace prize for 2014 with Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai for “their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education”.
Between 1901 and 2018, the award has been given 590 times to 935 laureates and organisations. The prize includes 9 million-kronor ($918,000) cash, a gold medal and a diploma.
Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi too tweeted his congratulations
Congratulations to #AbhijitBanerjee on winning the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Abhijit helped conceptualise NYAY that had the power to destroy poverty and boost the Indian economy.
Instead we now have Modinomics, that’s destroying the economy and boosting poverty. https://t.co/joBYusVFKT
— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) October 14, 2019
