-Hindustan Times He was delivering the inaugural Manoj Srivastava memorial lecture. Manoj Srivastava, a senior IAS officer and a widely acclaimed academic, passed away last year. Nobel laureate Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee on Thursday said the biggest worry due to a Covid-19 pandemic is the widening gap of inequality in education, as online learning exposure as well as Internet penetration continue to be extremely low, more so in a state like Bihar. He was...

-The Hindu West Bengal has effectively used the vaccines supplied by the Centre, economist says West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday met Nobel laureate Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee and discussed India’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic with him. Mr. Banerjee, who is a member of West Bengal’s COVID-19 management committee, said that his sense is that the biggest problem is that the Centre is not capable of generating the supply of vaccines...

-The Telegraph Standard model: The state provides a poor woman employment for 58 days a year, under the 100-day job guarantee scheme, at (Bengal's) daily wage rate of Rs 169. Cost: about Rs 20,000 over two years. Alternative: The state provides her an asset - maybe a small grocery - teaches her to run it and monitors her progress while giving a daily stipend for her consumption needs and ensuring basic healthcare...

-The Business Standard Kolkata: Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, Ford Foundation International professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has slammed the government's Right To Education (RTE) programme. This, he said, was only a step towards ensuring a means of livelihood for teachers. Banerjee said the programme, implemented in 2009, lacked sense. He said he wasn't hopeful about the outcome of the initiative. "It is simply for the teachers, by the teachers,...