- Lived:
- born 1951 (the year the Balzan Foundation's official biography confirms; her public record begins with the work, not the childhood) · educated at Cambridge and Delhi · four decades at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi · Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the University of Manchester since 2012 — and, throughout, in the villages of India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka where the fieldwork was done
- Field:
- development economics — gender and land rights, the economics of the household, environmental governance; a founding figure of feminist economics
- The Big Idea:
- Ask who legally owns the field, not who works it, and Indian poverty looks completely different: the woman farming the land almost never holds its title, and fixing that — in law, in deeds, in practice — improves her welfare, the farm's efficiency, and her power in her own house. She then helped change the inheritance law of a billion people to match.
- In their words:
- the property gap between men and women, she argued in A Field of One's Own, is "the single most critical contributor" to the gap in their economic well-being and power (she remains an active researcher as of September 2026)
- If you remember one thing:
- One economist asked the simplest question in Indian development — whose name is on the land? — built twenty years of evidence around the answer, and in 2005 helped persuade Parliament to give daughters the same birthright in ancestral property, farmland included, that sons had held for centuries.