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Updated: Oct 14, 2019 17:52 IST

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee Monday congratulated Abhijit Banerjee for winning the 2019 Nobel Prize for Economics.

Banerjee, an Indian-American, has jointly won the prestigious award along with his wife Esther Duflo and economist Michael Kremer.

“Hearty congratulations to Abhijit Banerjee, alumnus of South Point School & Presidency College Kolkata, for winning the Nobel Prize in Economics. Another Bengali has done the nation proud. We are overjoyed,” Banerjee said in a tweet.

He bagged the award for his “experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”.

Banerjee is an alumunus of South Point School in the city and Presidency College, Calcutta, where he completed his BSC degree in economics in 1981. He received his PhD in 1988 from Harvard University.

58-year-old Banerjee is currently the Ford Foundation international professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.