Quotes

I was very lucky to be born into a very academic family. I was well-read, well-trained in mathematics. I had lots of advantages to start with.

Investors don't like being in a world where everything is held up by and waiting for an approval from a very small number of people.

In terms of being a professional, I want to be professional with everyone.

I am not partisan in my economic thinking. We work with any number of state governments, many of which are BJP governments.

If the BJP government, like the Congress party, had asked what were the numbers on the fraction of people under a particular income, would I have not told them the truth? I would have told them exactly. I would have been as willing.

We are specialists who have something special to say. We have had no problem with working in any state interested in evaluating their policies.

I think it is a very important point for India to create a bureaucracy that lives on the ground and gets its stimulus from how life is on the ground.

We've learned a huge amount from organisations like Seva Mandir and Pratham, for example. In my personal experience, these organisations work on a very large scale with very poor people.

Catastrophic health shocks do enormous damage to families both economically and otherwise, and are easy to insure, because nobody gets them on purpose. On the other hand, insurance policies that only treat certain catastrophic illnesses are hard to comprehend, especially of you are illiterate and unused to the legalistic nature of exclusions etc.

When you compare individuals, rather than countries, you find that education improves both income and the quality of life.

The poverty line in the U.S., for example, has nothing to do with the poverty line in India. It is a relative poverty line. It is reset from time to time but it is related to U.S. median income, so if I set that to be the absolute poverty line everyone in India would essentially be poor.

We might think we are very different from Pakistan but we are not; we are the same people, with the same capacity for warmth and passion and intolerance and violence.

The problem of getting from home to the metro, BRT or bus stop makes many people take their cars to work. Why not start a fleet of electric buses that just circle through neighbourhoods connecting them to the various public transport hubs?

My guess is that while the elites would like cleaner air, they are not willing to give up the convenience of being able to use their cars at will to get it, perhaps because they believe (I suspect incorrectly) that they can protect themselves from the consequences of vehicular pollution by investing in air-conditioners and air purifiers.

Every nation necessarily inhabits a morally compromised space. All too often our ideals seem to be held to ransom by what we believe, rightly or wrongly, to be objective reality.

Whenever we try something new, mistakes will happen. Seemingly good ideas will fail and need to be re-thought.

One great pleasure of being an academic is the ability to trade in ideas with your colleagues and students; it is not much fun being the only connoisseur of some fine point.

We will remember UPA 2, if at all, it seems, as that period when things went mysteriously wrong - for the bribe-taking, buck-passing, foot-dragging, and general sense of paralysis.

The tragedy of the UPA is not that it didn't do anything, but that it is not able to take credit for what it has done. By staying silent when it should have been shouting from the rooftop and by protecting the guilty, it surrendered the governance agenda to AAP.

One advantage of not being in power is that we can dream of reshaping the world exactly as we please.

The investment climate in Gujarat under Modi has been very supportive of business interests; but it was the same under the Congress governments that came before him.

Gujarat is a pro-business state, where civil society organisations are comfortable with working to make sure that business does not suffer. Large parts of the rest of India, for better or worse, are very different.

The BJP must nurture the institutions that put credible checks and balances in place.

I will confess that in general decisiveness worries me; it is often an excuse for being impatient with the details or insufficiently sensitive to other people's concerns.

There is no doubt that in the last years of the UPA's rule, a certain lethargy had set into the way the central government went about its business.