We live in a world community, and economic contact has partly contributed to that. It’s also the case that economic opportunity opened up by economic contact has helped to a great extent to reduce poverty in many parts of the world.

Education makes human beings more articulate. It transforms people. You can think differently about the world. It makes it possible for you to get jobs. It makes a dramatic difference. It generates a social equity that we need.

If the government is vulnerable to public opinion, then famines are a dreadfully bad thing to have. You can’t win many elections after a famine, and you don’t like being criticized by newspapers, opposition parties in parliament, and so on. Democracy gives the government an immediate political incentive to act.

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.

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.

To conclude this discussion, assessment of justice demands engagement with the 'eyes of mankind',first, because we may variously identify with the others elsewhere and not just with our local community;second, because our choices and actions may affect the lives of others far as well as near;and third,because what they see from their respective perspective of history and geography may help us to overcome our own parochialism.

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