Kolkata has been home to six Nobel Prize winners

The predecessor to Banerjee of being an Indian to win the Nobel Prize for Economics is Amartya Sen. Sen won the award in 1998 for his work in welfare economics.

Sen was born in Shantiniketan in West Bengal. Interestingly, Sen was given his name by another Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, who was a close associate of his maternal grandfather.

Sen too had graduated from Presidency College, before becoming a professor in Jadavpur University in Kolkata. He had then gone on to teach at institutions like Trinity College, London School of Economics and many more.

Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. She was born into an Albanian family and had moved to India in 1929. She set up the Missionaries for Charity in Kolkata, then called Calcutta and continued to live there until her death in 1997. The city continues to be the home for her congregation and continues her work for the poor.

Indian physicist CV Raman won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1930. Born in the Madras Province, Raman had gone on to become a physics professor at the University of Calcutta. It was during his work in Kolkata that he discovered the groundbreaking Raman Effect which got him the Nobel Prize.

One cannot talk of Kolkata and Nobel Prize, and not talk about the great Tagore. Rabindranath Tagore, the poet, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Also called the Bard of Bengal, Tagore was the first non-European to have won a Nobel Prize.

Tagore is credited for many things – writing the Indian national anthem, redefining Bengali literature, Rabindro Sangeet, the list can go on. Having been against classroom schooling, Tagore set up Santiniketan, which even today stands as a centre for art and culture.

British doctor Ronald Ross won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1902 for his work on the transmission of malaria. Ross too had a connection with Kolkata. He worked at the Presidency General Hospital in Kolkata and even today, the Ronald Ross Memorial building stands tall in the city.