Sometimes one makes a distinction between urgency and importance. And while disasters are urgent, the basically most important thing is education. And that's what gives it ultimately urgency too, because unless you do it now, this important thing gets again and again postponed.

Even in areas like the most depressed region of India in terms of female education, namely Rajasthan, which has [one of] the lowest female literacy [rates] in India. Even there, 80 to 90 percent of the parents would like their girls to go to school. And indeed, about 80 percent would like them to be made compulsory.

People's identities as Indians, as Asians, or as members of the human race, seemed to give way - quite suddenly - to sectarian identification with Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh communities.

If you're dealing with grappling [with] problems of feeding people, the biggest impact in fertility reduction is girls' schools. Schooled girls make a bigger impact on that than any other factor - not these various regulations [such as] you have to have one child or that. It turns out that none of these are effective.

We need to ask the moral questions: Do I have a right to be rich? And do I have a right to be content living in a world with so much poverty and inequality? These questions motivate us to view the issue of inequality as central to human living.

From the mid-1970s, I also started work on the causation and prevention of famines.

There are some people who say that they’re concerned only with poverty but not inequality. But I don’t think that is a sustainable thought. A lot of poverty is, in fact, inequality because of the connection between income and capability—having adequate resources to take part in the life of the community.