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.

When I was giving a lecture in India, the capabilities that I have to be concerned with there, namely the ability of people to go to a school, to be literate, to be able to have a basic health care everywhere, to be able to seek some kind of medical response to one's ailment; these become central issues in the Indian context which they're not in the UK, because you're well beyond that.

South Korea at the end of the Second World War had a very low level of literacy. But suddenly, like in Japan, they determined they were going in that direction. In 20 years' time, they had transformed themselves. So when people go on saying that it's all because of perennial culture, which you cannot change, that's not the way the South Korean economy was viewed before the war ended. But again within 30 years, people went on saying there's an ancient culture in Korea that has been pro-education, which is true.

Belonging to humanity is a great thing for us, and I think the schools can do it. So I think we can look after the quality of education on the school even as we expand the availability of schooling.

I remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics.

I really do believe that education, despite this massive potential in transforming human lives, has not received the kind of attention that people should have given to it.

Each human being is a citizen of the world. We have many identities, of which one of the identities is our human identity. And that's something that the schools can provide, but that requires again a vision rather than being centers of hatred. It could be an enormous opportunity to give that mission.