In a historic day for Bengalis, Abhijit Banerjee and Sourav Ganguly seal their achievements with a top prize and job

Yet another Bengali has won a Nobel Prize for Economics. Abhijit Banerjee, alongside Ester Duflo and Michael Kremer, won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel. This news followed another development where Sourav Ganguly, the legendary Indian cricket team captain, got the top job at the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). Banerjee’s work in the field of poverty alleviation is path-breaking. His ideas have helped successive Governments plan policy interventions, particularly in education. The Nobel prize is the second for an economist, who started his educational career at Kolkata’s famed Presidency College after Amartya Sen. As for Ganguly, almost every Indian cricket fan will tell you that today’s dominating Indian cricket team is a direct result of the leadership style and aggressive nature honed by him and his team. However, while Banerjee is unlikely to rest on his laurels, commentating extensively on the state of the Indian economy, he has previously been critical of the policies followed by the Modi Government. On the other hand, Ganguly’s real big job starts now. While Indian cricket is in a position of might, the latest Test series win against South Africa makes it amply clear that the Indian cricket administration has been in a state of turmoil since the Supreme Court-monitored Committee of Administrators (CoA) took over. Ganguly’s appointment as the BCCI president is evidence that the cricket bureaucracy wants to release itself from the shackles of the CoA. His reputation might be able to convince the top court of the sheer ridiculousness of some “conflict of interest” cases raised by the CoA, particularly a laughable one against Ganguly’s erstwhile batting colleague, Rahul Dravid. It is not as if politics has stayed away from Indian cricket; Home Minister Amit Shah’s son Jay Shah and Minister of State for Finance, Anurag Thakur, too, have held executive positions.

Banerjee might, however, find celebrations muted back home as he was one of the signatories to a letter criticising the manipulation of statistics by the Government. His signature will carry much more heft now. But the Government should not miss this chance to involve Banerjee in its policy interventions, despite past criticism. India is in a challenging place with poverty and poor educational results being intertwined. Methods to achieve poverty alleviation and better educational results are a must if we have to take advantage of the demographic dividend. The opportunities are many and the results could be immense.