The higher education has always appealed to the South Asian social leaders across all the countries in South Asia. But primary education has been neglected. The oddity, by the way, is if you look at the contrast in India, there are some areas like Kerala where there's a long history of educational development.

I think that so many of our abilities to do things depend on interaction with each other.

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

I think gender inequality is a problem that goes back a long, long time. In human society, as a whole, women have tended to have a kind of inferior position - very often combined with playing up women as great role [models].

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.

Empowering women is key to building a future we want

Progress is more plausibly judged by the reduction of deprivation than by the further enrichment of the opulent