Besides, it is a good time for Amartya's work to be recognised because it counteracts the signal that went from India through Pokhran. Pokhran highlights how we forget the future for the immediate.

But Amartya is dealing with reality; here we are thinking not of destruction but preservation.

In the moment of danger that we are passing through, we must stop to think about the future of mankind and our little planet. As a friend of mine points out, today we are like a sinking ship without lifeboats. The prize shows that we are thinking about the lifeboats. It marks the beginning of another phase of Indian intellectual achievement.

What are your views on his work?
I do not understand economics, but from whatever I have read of his writings and known of his beliefs, I realise that he has used the science of economics as a tool to bring about awareness about reality of the human condition. His economics says that man is not a self-centered animal who thinks only of self-promotion, but one who also thinks of others around him. We have our set of values and economics must take note of that. The basic dangers that mankind is facing today: that is what he has been trying to show us through his work about famine, poverty, inequality, gender differences etc.

Amartya's first book Collective Choice and Welfare Economics, published in the '70s, opened up many doors after Kenneth Arrow's Impossibility Theory, which had put a lid on the future of welfare economics.

What sort of significance does the Nobel hold for the future?
What is important is not that he won the Nobel Prize, but that his work has got the recognition that will inspire many young people to work on these lines and create a generation of new economists, who will use economics as a tool for the preservation of mankind.

I have no doubt that there will come a moment of recognition of the reality of this kind of economics and it will be applied both in India and across the world.