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.

The student community of Presidency College was also politically most active.

There are few subjects that match the social significance of women's education in the contemporary world.

Anything that increases the voice of young women tends therefore to reduce the fertility rate.

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.

I think education has a bigger impact on the lives of people than absolutely anything else.

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.