From 2009 to 2012, during the United Progressive Alliance's second term, Basu served as the Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India.

[citation needed] After earning his master's degree, Basu was supposed to move to England to study law and take over his father's legal practice, but he had fallen in love with the concept of logic and deductive reasoning and became fascinated by Amartya Sen's work.

[7] Basu's childhood interest in Euclidean geometry found expression and drew attention when he was Chief Economist of the World Bank and published a paper giving a new proof of the Pythagoras theorem, via a property of isosceles triangles.

[8][9] Basu has held visiting professorships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the Université catholique de Louvain's Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, and the London School of Economics, where he was a distinguished visitor in 1993.

[12] Basu is a columnist for BBC News Online, the Hindustan Times, Business Standard and is the author of several books on economics and a play, Crossings at Benaras Junction, which was published in The Little Magazine (vol.

[citation needed] Basu is the motivation behind Arthapedia, an online portal that provide explanations to the concepts used in Indian public policy to assist its understanding among citizens.

[citation needed] Basu has written on the importance of Adam Smith's identification of the invisible hand of the market and how that helps coordinate the self-interested behaviour of individuals to achieve order and optimality in an economy.

He feels that this is such an unexpected finding that it led many traditional economists to overlook and then forget that moral qualities, like honesty, fairness, and integrity are critical for an economy to flourish.

This is the reason why radical movements such as the one in the USSR began trying to build a humane, socialist society and ended up with crony capitalism.