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.

Gender inequality is not one problem, it's a collection of problems.

I left Delhi, in 1971, shortly after Collective Choice and Social Welfare was published in 1970.

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.

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

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

the identity of an individual is essentially a function of her choices, rather than the discovery of an immutable attribute