 The World Bank promoted your appointment as a chief economist as someone uniquely suited to help client countries with evidence-based solutions and advice. And what does this mean in practice? Well, that is the World Bank's description of me. I hope that is right. It simply means that when you formulate policy, you do it with the best of scientific evidence in hand. And indeed, I believe in that. I mean, it's a combination of using the best evidence and best kind of reasoning, bringing the two together and crafting policy. Because in development, it's very easy to be taken up by standard things that people say with no attempt to verify as to whether those things really work or not. And I like to believe that when the World Bank made that description, gave that description of me, it was stressing the fact that I'm a firm believer in the use of scientific evidence as well as possible. Someone said that the foreign aid industry is a fashion industry because trends come and go and everybody seems to form the same trends. Do you agree with that? There's a bit of a tendency of that in every walk of life because for human beings, once a trend comes in, you get onto that. It's costly to change after that. And so the trend tends to persist for a while even after the evidence suggests that you have to move away from this. So the aid industry is a bit like that, but life itself is a bit like that. What experiences a safe economic advisor to the Indian government are you bringing with you to the World Bank? You know, I am bringing quite a bit from my experience in India. One is a recognition that economics has to be thought of as a discipline that is situated or embedded in other disciplines, in sociology, in politics, in anthropology. If you don't understand these essential structures, broader structures of society, you don't understand economics. This became very, very clear to me in my life as a chief economic advisor in India, and I would like to bring this lesson here. Another thing I do want to bring is that good economic policy requires two things. It requires passion and determination, true, but it also needs scientific dispassion and inquiry. And I'd like to bring this lesson also to my job in the bank. So as a researcher, as an academic, how hard do you find it to sort of teach official bureaucrats the foundations of science? They are tough students in the sense that most of them have very set views. So unlike students who are fresh into college and ready to take in new ideas, bureaucrats are people who have already been in the College of Life for a long time and have their set ideas, it takes time. At the same time, and this I can't talk about, my current job when I'm just starting out from my nearly three years in India, you also meet people who are just remarkable at the top level of the profession. So it makes a difference that you're talking to some people who are extremely deeply committed, but there are all kinds. Could you tell us something about the work you've done for you and you wider, and how did you come here in the first place? You know, in 1988, it was Amartya Sen, who I think played a role in my visiting here for a month. In fact, I remembered that last night because I had stayed on a street called Mekon Kattu and I had forgotten about that till I was taking a stroll last evening and suddenly saw Mekon Kattu and felt very nostalgic about 1988 when I had visited. So I visited here, worked with a bunch of people, importantly with, interacted a lot with Siddique Osmani and several other people. And that turned out to be an interaction which was so good. I wrote a bunch of papers here that I kept up my interaction. I've visited wider several times over the years. I've given the wider annual lecture and it's one of my more cherished academic interactions is the interaction with wider.