I have not had any serious non-academic job.

When the Nobel award came my way, it also gave me an opportunity to do something immediate and practical about my old obsessions, including literacy, basic health care and gender equity, aimed specifically at India and Bangladesh.

It is also very engaging - and a delight - to go back to Bangladesh as often as I can, which is not only my old home, but also where some of my closest friends and collaborators live and work.

I was told Indian women don't think like that about equality. But I would like to argue that if they don't think like that they should be given a real opportunity to think like that.

[To organize a school] looks much more difficult in theory than it does in practice.

I don’t think that India is much celebrated for its democracy. Democracy has been a very neglected commodity at home and abroad.

From the mid-1970s, I also started work on the causation and prevention of famines.

I was born in a University campus and seem to have lived all my life in one campus or another.

I left Delhi, in 1971, shortly after Collective Choice and Social Welfare was published in 1970.

Even though I’m pro-globalization, I have to say thank God for the anti-globalization movement. They’re putting important issues on the agenda.

Being able to read, write, do your sums really transforms a human being.

China had managed to reduce their fertility to a large extent because of basic expansion of women's education, not because of the one-child family.

Opponents of globalisation may see it as a new folly, but it is neither particularly new, nor, in general, a folly.

Resenting the obtuseness of others is not good ground for shooting oneself in the foot.

No democracy with a free press has ever experienced a major famine.

I'’m generally in favor of economic globalization. Having said that, it doesn’t always work and does not immediately work in the interest of all. There are sufferers.

But the idea that I should be a teacher and a researcher of some sort did not vary over the years.

There is considerable evidence that women's education and literacy tend to reduce the mortality rates of children

Poverty is not really as much of an obstacle to educational expansion as it's sometimes made out to be.