Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee has said that Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman was his contemporary in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and they both stood on "similar" lines on "certain" issues during their academic years in the university.

Speaking in a television interview, he said that it was not as if the two had deep disagreements. "(Sitharaman was) One of the people whom I knew well... We were even often on similar sides on certain issues. She was my contemporary in JNU. She knew me, I knew her," he said. "I would not say we were close friends, but we were friends. And it's not that we had deep disagreements," Banerjee added.