Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty.

Your voice is much more articulate and people listen to you if you've been to school. In family decisions, not surprisingly, the biggest impact in reducing fertility is girls' education.

Human development, as an approach, is concerned with what I take to be the basic development idea: namely, advancing the richness of human life, rather than the richness of the economy in which human beings live, which is only a part of it.

I think the whole progress over the last two or three millennia has been entirely dependent on ideas and techniques and commodities and people moving from one part of the world to another. It seems difficult to take an anti-globalization view if one takes globalization properly in its full sense.

Hardly any famine affects more than 5 percent, almost never more than 10 percent, of the population. The largest proportion of a population affected was the Irish famine of the 1840s, which came close to 10 percent over a number of years.

The anti-globalization movement is one of the biggest globalized events of the contemporary world, people coming from everywhere, —Australia, Indonesia, Britain, India, Poland, Germany, South Africa—to demonstrate in Seattle or Quebec. What could be more global than that?

Opportunity could be defined in so many ways. There's one way of defining it, equality of opportunity, which is in fact the equality of capability, but the libertarians got there first and they have -- like the Americans getting onto the moon, naming every crater after something like an astronaut -- they have got there and named opportunity in a way that we cannot get ownership of now.

Even in areas like the most depressed region of India in terms of female education, namely Rajasthan, which has one of the lowest female literacy rates in India. Even there, 80 to 90 percent of the parents would like their girls to go to school. And indeed, about 80 percent would like them to be made compulsory.

The notion of human right builds on our shared humanity. These rights are not derived from the citizenship of any country, or the membership of any nation, but are presumed to be claims or entitlements of every human being. They differ, therefore, from constitutionally created rights guaranteed for specific people.

There’s a clear and strong connection between fertility reduction and women’s literacy and empowerment, including women’s gainful employment. If you look at the more than 300 districts of India, the strongest influences in explaining fertility variations are women’s literacy and gainful economic employment.

Education can really transform the insecurities in the world into a bigger vision of what we are as human beings.

Poverty is the deprivation of opportunity.

There is considerable evidence that women's education and literacy tend to reduce the mortality rates of children.

From the mid-1970s, I also started work on the causation and prevention of famines.

I was born in a University campus and seem to have lived all my life in one campus or another.

I don’t think that India is much celebrated for its democracy. Democracy has been a very neglected commodity at home and abroad.

You have to be interested in inequality. The issue of inequality and that of poverty are not separable.

Poverty is a big barrier if you are at the bottom layer of society, don't know where the next meal is coming from. It is not a big barrier of taking the rich with the poor in a big society to provide schooling for all.

When the Nobel award came my way, it also gave me an opportunity to do something immediate and practical about my old obsessions, including literacy, basic health care and gender equity, aimed specifically at India and Bangladesh.

The student community of Presidency College was also politically most active.