Proud moment: Farhan Akhtar, Dia Mirza congratulate Prof Abhijit Banerjee on winning Nobel Prize

"Proud moment for us," said Farhan Akhtar as he congratulated Prof Abhijit Banerjee who shares the Nobel Prize 2019 in Economics with his French-American wife Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer.

"Congratulations to Abhijit Banerjee who along with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer won the #NobelPrize2019 for Economics. Proud moment for us all," he tweeted.

Three economists have been bestowed with the Nobel Prize "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."

Dia Mirza too extended a word of congratulations writing, "Congratulations to renowned economist #AbhijitBanerjee for winning the #NobelPrize2019 for economics jointly with his wife Esther Duflo and another economist Michael Kremer on their approach for alleviation of global poverty. #India is proud."

"The research conducted by the 2019 Economic Sciences laureates has considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty. In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research," a statement from the Nobel Prize Twitter handle said.

The three economists have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty.

"It divides the issue into smaller, more manageable questions -- for example, the most effective interventions for improving child health," the statement added.

"Over 700 million people still subsist on extremely low incomes. Every year, five million children still die before their fifth birthday, often from diseases that could be prevented or cured with relatively cheap and simple treatments," the statement outlined.

In the mid-1990s, Kremer, an American economist, and his colleagues demonstrated how powerful an experiment-based approach can be, by using field experiments to test a range of interventions that could improve school results in western Kenya.

Banerjee and Duflo, along with Kremer soon performed similar studies of other issues and in other countries, including India. Their experimental research methods now entirely dominate development economics.

"The 2019 Economic Sciences Laureates' research findings have dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice. As a result of one of their studies, more than 5 million Indian children have benefitted from programmes of remedial tutoring in schools," the statement said.

Prof Banerjee completed his MA in Economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi in 1983. Later, he went on to obtain a PhD in Economics at Harvard University in 1988.

The 58-year-old Kolkata-born economist is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.