New Delhi: It was March 1 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi mocked economists in UP's Maharajganj in a rally and said "hard work is more powerful than Harvard".


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PM Modi's "hard work is more powerful than Harvard" remark came after the latest GDP data showed demonetisation did not affect growth rate, rather the figures improved.


Now, Harvard Business Review (HBR), in an article titled - 'Early Lessons from India’s Demonetization Experiment', has termed PM Narendra Modi's election win as 'Bollywood blockbuster'.


The HBR article has been written by Bhaskar Chakravorti. He is a public policy professor at Tufts University.


Noteworthy, Chakravorti was one of the first critics of demonetisation. 


In a paper published on December 14, 2016, in Harvard Business Review, Chakravorti had called demonetisation a “case study in poor policy and even poorer execution. Unfortunately, it is also the poor that bear the greatest burden.”


In his latest paper 'Early Lessons from India’s Demonetization Experiment', Chakravorti says, “Four months passed. The country emerged with few obvious scars. Although the impact on corruption remains to be seen, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government was rewarded with victory in mid-term state-level elections, seen as a referendum on its unprecedented action. Short of any singing, dancing, and costume changes, this sequence could have been taken from Bollywood, a movie industry widely known for its fantastical flights of fancy.”


His article begins with the statement - Did India just pull off a monetary and political miracle?


Now, Chakravorti praises demonetisation


"The unqualified winners of the demonetization period were the mobile wallet players, with the market leader, Paytm, claiming 170 million users, with a traffic increase of 435%, and a 250% increase in overall transactions and transaction value. Arguably, the surge in business for mobile wallets was natural, at least for the 17% of the population that owned a smartphone in early 2016," the article said.


The article ends with - "Ultimately, the victory of narrative over data may be the takeaway from India’s demonetization saga. And that may qualify as a plot for a Bollywood blockbuster after all."


What PM Modi said about Harvard?


"On the one hand are those (critics of note ban) who talk of what people at Harvard say and on the other hand is a poor man's son who through his hard work is trying to improve the economy," he said.


"In fact, hard work is much more powerful than Harvard" he said without elaborating.


His remark came against the backdrop of Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen terming demonetisation as a "despotic action that has struck at the root of economy based on trust".


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Who is Bhaskar Chakravorti? 


Chakravorti is the Senior Associate Dean of International Business & Finance at The Fletcher School at Tufts University and founding Executive Director of Fletcher’s Institute for Business in the Global Context. He is the author of The Slow Pace of Fast Change.