Quotes

So, I went to Harvard and I got exposed to American work habits. I didn't even realise for a while that I was behind. I kind of had the illusion that I was understanding things. But people worked so hard and the thing I learnt first in America was that people work incredibly hard.

Independence day is an interesting time to reflect on our strange fealty to institutions that the British left us, including those that were explicitly set up to be used against us.

People who live inside garbage piles - that should not be happening.

Students often say things that they will one day change their minds about, but also things that change our minds when we think about them.

In the development business doing something for both women and the environment is the equivalent of holding a royal flush in poker.

Policy change is nothing if it's not patient work.

If you want to leave move money in the hands of poor people, you cannot do it through personal income tax cuts. You have to just give them money.

We value seriousness and willingness to solve problems.

If you happen to be mostly depressed about the state of your life, I don't know whether you feel like doing impulse control.

If democracy is to be an articulation of mutual respect, a leader in a democracy leads by showing respect to all.

I was an Indian with zero sense of caste till I was 20. That's an unusual privilege but it came out of the fact that I was a middle-class Bengali.

Will we make all poverty history? No. But can we solve some of these extreme and egregious forms of poverty? I think yes, and we should.

I am half Bengali and half Marathi.

Anyone who has a child knows the importance of not over-playing your hand. He was up all night playing some game on his smartphone and you feel like saying that if it happens again the phone is gone. Forever. Till he is old enough to buy his own. Till then he can have your old Nokia.

It is absolute poverty that you could end, but I think relative poverty is a whole other issue.

The Korean government is the first to declare that if you replace people with machines you have to pay a tax. It's a tax on robots. They make private companies internalise the social cost of unemployment. Social benefit is not the same as private benefit. We have to realise this.

Partly, identity politics is a result of economic failure.

Healthcare expenses often wipe out families.

The AAP was not the first group of well-meaning outsiders in politics.

Well-designed subsidies help the poor make the best of whatever opportunities they have; poorly designed ones either do very little or actually make things worse for them.

One big mistake that we made in Delhi is that we made it a low-rise city which means that rich people have nice green colonies while the poor live in dusty areas.

Insurance is important for protecting the health of people and Ujjwala is quite useful to low-income women.

If PM-Kisan is implemented well, it will leave some money in the hands of poor farmers.

I'm not an early morning person.

I have learnt an enormous amount from talking to people on the ground.