Abhijit Banerjee (AP photo)

KOLKATA: Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee will reach India this Friday and is expected to reach Kolkata late on October 22. He will spend the next day at his Kolkata home, the Nobel laureate's mother and brother confirmed on Tuesday.

Banerjee will be in New Delhi this week to launch his second book - 'Good Economics for Hard Times, Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems' - on Saturday.

"The book launch was scheduled well before the announcement of the Nobel Prize . I had a talk with him last night and he has confirmed that he will attend it. After the book launch, he has some prescheduled appointments, following which, he will come home on October 23 for a day," said Aniruddha Bhaskar Banerjee, the Nobel winner's younger brother.

Banerjee is scheduled to attend an event organised by the Liver Foundation West Bengal in New Delhi on October 22 and take a late evening flight to the city. He would be travelling alone. His wife, co-Nobel prize recipient and co-author of the new book, Esther Duflo , will stay back with the couple's two kids.

Back home in Kolkata, their 83-year-old mother had no respite from the flood of congratulatory messages, phone calls and visits by neighbours, friends, relatives and state representatives even on Tuesday."I can't wait to welcome him back home after this prestigious honour. Had his father been alive, he would have been even happier. But we are not celebrating yet. We are waiting for him to come home first," said Nirmala Banerjee, an eminent economist herself.

The West Bengal government is planning a gala civic reception for Banerjee. State sources indicated they would also invite Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen to the event.

Members of the Presidency Alumni Association said Banerjee's nomination to this year's annual 'Alumnus Award' was a forgone conclusion now. "We plan to meet him on October 23 and work out the dates by next week," said Bivas Chaudhuri, secretary of the Presidency Alumni Association.

(Inputs from Dwaipayan Ghosh & Debashis Konar)



In Video: Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee to launch his book in Delhi this weekend