NEW DELHI: Indian-American Abhijit Banerjee , along with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer , won the 2019 economics Nobel for their work on finding new ways to tackle poverty. Duflo, a French-American, and Banerjee have been married for four years. They teach in Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They are the first couple to win the economics Nobel, and the sixth Nobel-winning couple. Kremer is with Harvard University.The Nobel citation said the work of the three economists has “…improved efforts to … fight global poverty” by breaking down a complex problem into “smaller, more manageable questions”.Congratulatory tweets to Banerjee from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, external affairs minister S Jaishankar as well as CMs Arvind Kejriwal and Mamata Banerjee, were among many such messages from India and globally.Banerjee is the second India born to get the economics Nobel — the formal award is called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Duflo is the second woman to receive the prize.Abhijit Banerjee, along with Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, was part of a panel discussion at the ET Global Business Summit 2015Amartya Sen, winner of the economics Nobel in 1998, also congratulated Banerjee. Born in Calcutta (as Kolkata was called then) in 1961, Banerjee’s early education was in the city’s South Point School and his college was Presidency. After a masters in economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Banerjee got his PhD from Harvard.Banerjee and Duflo’s work on poverty first drew global attention with the publication of their 2011 book, Poor Economics. In that widely acclaimed volume, the two Nobel Laureates had written: “…we have to abandon the habit of reducing the poor to cartoon characters and take the time to really understand their lives, in all their complexity and richness.”The authors’ insights included why poor families often invest in the education of only one of several children or why small farmers are often reluctant to use better farming methods. Their central thesis was that small changes, including tweaks in existing structures, often produced lasting and big outcomes in reducing poverty. That book also brought attention to the usefulness of a new field research method for economics: the randomised controlled trial — used in pharmaceutical drug testing.In 2015, Banerjee, along with Nobel laureate Paul Krugman and former chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian, was part of a panel discussion on the global and Indian economies under the aegis of the ET Global Business Summit. Banerjee has also been a contributor to ET’s Edit Page.Banerjee has spoken on some of India’s current public policy debates. Speaking to CNBC-TV 18 after the announcement of the Nobel prize, Banerjee said India’s economy is “on shaky ground”, and that hope for growth revival is uncertain.During the 2019 general election campaign, Congress said he was one of three economists the party had consulted while framing its universal basic income scheme — NYAY. Banerjee had told the media later than for NYAY to be funded, extra resources will have to be found. He was also one of the 108 academics who signed a letter that criticised government data analyses.Banerjee and Duflo’s second book, Good Economics for Hard Times, is set for publication, and it draws on many current debates globally on public policy. ET carries an extract from the forthcoming book in today’s Edit Page. In the preamble of their new book, Banerjee and Duflo write that looking at the world, “inequality is exploding, environmental catastrophes and global policy disasters loom, but we are left with little more than platitudes to confront them with.”The book’s first chapter, “Make Economics Great Again” — a play on Donald Trump’s election-winning slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ — the Nobel prize winners say: “We live in an age of growing polarization. From Hungary to India, from the Philippines to the United States, from the United Kingdom to Brazil … the public conversation between the left and the right has turned more and more into a high-decibel slanging match.”His work on development economics got Banerjee the Nobel, but his early approach to economics was heavily mathematical, people who knew him well during his college and post-graduate years told ET. Batchmates describe him as a “quant”, an oft-used term in academia for the mathematically gifted. His Harvard PhD was mathematics-heavy analyses of herd behaviour in stock markets under information asymmetry.G Sreekumar, Banerjee’s batchmate in JNU who went to join the Reserve Bank of India and is now a banking supervision adviser for the International Monetary Fund, told ET: “Abhijit started out (in JNU) a legend in many ways, having topped his degree course in Presidency” and having “topped both JNU and Delhi School of Economics admissions (in 1981)”. He said Banerjee was a star student in JNU; his MA degree had “eight A-pluses, six As, and two A-minuses, the last two only because he was irregular in class”. Banerjee’s ability to solve complex problems quickly was noted by his teachers at both his college and university, said Sreekumar and others who knew him well.Those who know him said Banerjee was never a “nerd”, he read widely and was academically brilliant. He was a “fun guy” with a keen interest in Indian classical music that he inherited from his economist father, late Dipak Banerjee. But like his wide-ranging intellectual interests, Banerjee’s taste in music is also eclectic, said his friends.And Banerjee and Duflo, unlike perhaps many economists, seem to have a keen sense of humour, including the ability to laugh at their own profession. Their new book tells a joke about a woman who’s told by her doctor she has only six months to live. The doctor then tells her that to make the half-year seem longer, she should move to South Dakota (an American state that was ranked the second-most boring in a 2018 US survey) — and marry an economist.