Mamata Banerjee interacted with Abhijit Banerjee's mother and relatives for a while.

Days after renowned economist Abhijit Banerjee won the Nobel Prize, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee today visited his South Kolkata residence to congratulate his mother.

The Chief Minister exchanged pleasantries with Nirmala Banerjee and other relatives of the economist at her seventh floor apartment on Ballygunge Circular Road around 5 pm, news agency IANS reported. Mamata Banerjee was accompanied by Home Secretary Alapan Bandopadhyay and West Bengal Minister Indranil Sen, among others.

According to the news agency, Indranil Sen - also a noted singer - recited a song composed by Rabindranath Tagore on the occasion.

The 58-year-old economist, employed as a professor at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, was declared as the joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics along with his wife Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for their "experimental approach to alleviating global poverty" on Monday. He is only the second person of Indian origin after Amartya Sen to win a Nobel in this field.

Abhijit Banerjee currently holds the post of Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab along with Esther Duflo and renowned academic Sendhil Mullainathan in 2003, and serves as one of its directors even now.

Incidentally, Abhijit Banerjee is scheduled to arrive in the city on the night of October 22. The state government plans to hold a grand felicitation ceremony for the Nobel laureate, West Bengal Minister Partha Chatterjee had said on Tuesday.

Mamata Banerjee had referred to the 58-year-old economist's Kolkata connection in a tweet posted soon the news came through. "Hearty congratulations to Abhijit Banerjee, alumnus of South Point School and Presidency College, Kolkata, for winning the Nobel Prize in Economics. Another Bengali has done the nation proud. We are overjoyed," she had said then.

(With inputs from IANS)