Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort. Not surprisingly, while India continued to have famines under British rule right up to independence... they disappeared suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and... a free press and an active political opposition constitute the best early-warning system a country threaten by famines can have.

You can’t prevent undernourishment so easily, but famines you can stop with half an effort. Then the question was why don’t the governments stop them?

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

The opportunities, income, schools facilities, the basic income support that the government provides or any of these things .. public transport arrangements we have.. all these are part of the way our lives and freedoms are effected.

Virtually everything we do is dependent on others, from the arts and culture to farmers who grow the food we eat. Quite a lot of the differences that make us rich and poor are matters just of luck. To somehow revel in one’s privilege would be a mistake. An even bigger mistake would be trying to convert that into a theory that the rich are so much more productive than many of us.

To say that the whole of the industrial experience of Europe and America just shows the rewards of exploiting the Third World is a gross simplification.

Women had always been thought of as looking after the family when men go and earn an income and they're the bread earner and so on. So there is a kind of generation of inequality, [and], on top of the fact, women have pregnancies and periods, [and] when the children are very small, there are greater demands on their time. So one way or another women have had a pretty rough deal in the past, and there's no reason why that should continue, and any country that has tried to remedy that has succeeded in doing so.