By Raja Chowdhury
The man in blue shirt eating food with beggars and labourers
on the road is someone whom the world admires. You can find him near any temple
or Gurudwara where food is being distributed. He could be found at any cheap
street food kiosk asking for Dal Chawal or Roti Sabzi. And he does this with a purpose.
He could land in any country he wishes to. He can get a
rousing reception, a lucrative job with the government with any perks he
desires. He will be welcomed with open arms. But he loves India so much that he
has no problem in sharing food with even the beggars in front of temples, with
a purpose to understand India better.
When asked does he need more 'Rotis' he replied in fluent
hindi: 'Sab ko do roti mil rahi hai. Main bhi 2 roti hi khaunga' (When
everybody is getting 2 rotis. I will eat only 2).
Meet Jean Dreze. a Belgian-born Indian Economist, social
scientist and activist. He has worked on several developmental issues facing
India like hunger, famine, gender inequality.
He was a member of the National Advisory Council (NAC) and
had played an instrumental role in RTI and MNREGA implementation.
His co-authors include Nobel laureate in economics Amartya
Sen, with whom he has written on famine, Nicholas Stern, with whom he has
written on policy reform when market prices are distorted, and Nobel laureate
in economics Angus Deaton. He is currently an honorary Professor at the Delhi
School of Economics, and Visiting Professor at the Department of Economics,
Ranchi University. He was a member of the National Advisory Council of India in
both first and second term, but only for a year each time.
Dreze is well known for his commitment to social justice,
both in India and internationally. During and after his PhD in India, he
adopted a lifestyle of voluntary simplicity. While in the LSE, he frequently
slept rough and lived with homeless squatters, helping to start a squatters movement
in 1988 that opened buildings to the homeless and defied eviction. He wrote a
short book about this movement and the life of the homeless in London, called
No. 1 Clapham Road: the diary of a squat.
Dreze is known for refusing luxury and, while doing fieldwork,
still lives and works in the same conditions as his respondents. In Delhi he
and his wife Bela Bhatia had a one-room house in a jhuggi.
Apart from academic work he has been actively involved in
many social movements including the peace movement, the Right to Information
campaign that led to the Right to Information Act in India, the Right to Food
campaign in India, among others.
During the 1990–1991 Iraq War, he joined a peace camp
stationed on the Iraq-Kuwait border. His 1992 article with Haris Gazdar,
"Hunger and Poverty in Iraq, 1991", was one of the first assessments
of Iraq's economy after the Gulf war, and an early warning about the potential
human costs of the Iraq sanctions. Another book that came out of Iraq is War
and Peace in the Gulf, edited by Bela Bhatia, Jean Dreze and Kathy Kelly.
Jean Drèze taught at
the London School of Economics in the 1980s, his only full-time post, and at
the Delhi School of Economics, and had been Visiting Professor at the G.B. Pant
Social Science Institute, Allahabad. Presently, he is an Honorary Chair
Professor of the "Planning and Development Unit" created by the
Planning Commission, Government of India, in the Department of Economics,
University of Allahabad, India. He has made wide-ranging contributions to
development economics and public economics, with special reference to India.
He has worked on many issues relating to development
economics including hunger, famine, education, gender inequality, childcare,
school feeding, employment guarantee etc. His works combine standard economic
methods (such as his articles relating to poverty in India) and tools that are
used more commonly by anthropologists (such as his work on the village of
Palanpur, Moradabad District, Uttar Pradesh, India with Nicholas Stern, Peter
Lanjouw and others, which included him living for a period in village under the
same conditions as local people, farming a plot of land and keeping animals as
recounted with Naresh Sharma in the article "Sharecropping in a North
Indian Village", Journal of Development Studies, Oct. 1996). The
combination of extensive field work and qualitative analysis of everyday life
and poverty, along with quantitative work makes his work distinctive in the
field of economics. He uniquely brings to the table his extensive fieldwork—few
economists live as much in the country's villages—combined with outstanding
analytical skills.
It is not coincidence that Amartya Sen co-authored on a
number of major publications on India, given his unique contacts with the grassroots
and has even remarked that the "agreeable thing" about working with
Dreze is that "he does most of the work and I get most of the
credit".
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