- Lived:
- born 1961, raised in Calcutta (Kolkata); Presidency College and JNU, then Harvard; a professor at MIT since the early 1990s — but the laboratory of his life's work is India (as of September 2026)
- Field:
- economics — development economics; co-founder of the randomized-controlled-trial school of poverty research and of J-PAL, its global engine
- The Big Idea:
- You find out whether a programme for the poor actually works the way you find out whether a drug works — by testing it, with a coin flip deciding who gets it first — and you change policy only on the evidence.
- In their words:
- the enemies of good anti-poverty policy, he and Esther Duflo wrote in Poor Economics, are the "three I's" — ideology, ignorance, inertia (as of September 2026)
- If you remember one thing:
- A kilo of dal, offered at a village immunization camp in Rajasthan, roughly doubled the number of children fully vaccinated — and the experiment that proved it helped turn the ancient argument about poverty from a war of ideologies into a science of evidence.