Meet Abhijit Banerjee, the 10th Indian, Indian-origin person to win Nobel Prize

Indian-American economist Abhijit Banerjee on Monday won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, becoming the tenth Indian or a person of Indian origin to win the prestigious global award.

Banerjee, his French-American wife Esther Duflo and the US' Michael Kremer on Monday were awarded the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty".

Banerjee completed his MA in Economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi in 1983. Later, he went on to obtain a PhD in Economics at Harvard University in 1988.

The 58-year-old Kolkata-born economist is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He joined the select list of Indians or persons of Indian origin who have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2013 for his work in the field of Literature. He was awarded Nobel Prize "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West".

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was awarded Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 "for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him".

In 1968, Indian-American HG Khorana was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology, along with Robert W Holley and Marshall W Nirenberg "for their interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis".

In 1979, Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She founded a new sisterhood, Missionaries of Charity. Mother Teresa and her helpers built homes for orphans, nursing homes for lepers and hospices for the terminally ill in Calcutta. Mother Teresa's organisation also engaged in aid work in other parts of the world.

Another Indian American Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 "for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars". He shared his prize with William A Fowler.

In 1998, Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize "for his contributions to welfare economics".

Tami Nadu born Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome".

The Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 was awarded to Kailash Satyarthi for his "struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education". He shared his prize with Pakistan's Malala Yousafzai.

The Nobel Prize in Literature for the year 2001 was awarded to VS Naipaul. Born in Trinidad in 1932, the descendant of indentured labourers shipped from India, Naipaul went on to become a UK citizen.

(ANI)