Abhijit Banerjee, Cheyenne Olivier and Kinnera Murthy at Hyderabad Literary Festival 2026
Hyderabad: Nobel laureate and economist Abhijit Banerjee, on Monday, January 26, alleged that the growing opposition to India’s reservation policies is rooted in the shrinking of good jobs. “Good jobs have not grown,” he claimed.
Speaking at the concluding day of the three-day Hyderabad Literary Festival (HLF), Banerjee said that fewer jobs have created a “pressure cooker” environment, leading to anxiety and stress.
“People worry about how their children will hold on to middle-class privileges if they cannot get the kind of jobs they have. When opportunities are scarce, people think, ‘I did not get this job because it went to ‘those people’,” he said.
The conversation then turned to conspicuous consumption and why people from lower classes “prefer” lavish weddings rather than invest in a good education or healthcare.
Abhijit Banerjee argued that access explains this gap. “It is easier to spend money on weddings than to get an education,” he said. Education, he explained, requires a rare mix of parental effort, money and social sophistication, making it far less accessible.
“Healthcare, too, works in similar ways,” he said.
“To be sophisticated consumers of education and healthcare is extremely hard,” he said, adding, “It is far easier to be consumers of grand weddings, videography and multi-layered Bollywood-themed celebrations.”
Banerjee expressed concern over the Centre’s Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) (VB-G RAM G) and the proposal to reduce funding share.
“The fraction of federal funding is being reduced, and that means poorer states will spend even less,” he said, adding that this would undermine efforts to reduce poverty. “That doesn’t seem to serve the purpose of fighting poverty.”
He said the scheme had not yet “settled” and could still change amid pushback, including from within the ruling BJP, and refrained from taking a firm position until the policy’s final contours became clear.
VB-G RAM-G has replaced the United Progressive Alliance government’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).
Asked about India emerging as the world’s fourth-largest economy, Banerjee dismissed the ranking as irrelevant from a welfare perspective. “I find this number uninteresting because it’s not per capita,” he said. “We have 1.4 billion people. Germany has one-twentieth of that population. It doesn’t tell you how people are actually living.”
Banerjee also called for greater devolution of power to states and local governments, arguing that democracy works best when decision-making is closer to people. He pointed to the large size of Lok Sabha constituencies as a structural problem that limits representatives’ effectiveness.
He also discussed his new book, titled Chhaunk and reflected in a session moderated by Kinnera Murthy with illustrator Cheyenne Olivier. Reflecting on his personal journey, he spoke about growing up in a household surrounded by teachers and books.
“I only realised how privileged I was when I went to Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and encountered several who till then had never had the chance to read books, even as leisure,” he said.
“That is a huge privilege, and it’s irreplaceable,” he admitted, “What we call merit is usually a huge product of social circumstances.”
Banerjee also addressed the idea of authenticity in food, especially the criticism often directed at fusion dishes. He argued that the belief in a fixed, “original” version of cuisine does not hold up when we look at history.
“This idea that there is something authentic and staple in our cuisine is not true,” he said. Taking Punjabi food as an example, he noted that ingredients now seen as essential were once absent. “Punjabi food in the 1500s did not have potatoes, tomatoes and chillies,” he explained, adding that Indian cuisines have repeatedly been reinvented as new ingredients arrived in the country.
This post was last modified on January 26, 2026 9:48 pm