Jean Drèze

Jean Drèze (born 1959) is a Belgian-born Indian^[1] development economist and activist.^[2] His work in India include issues like hunger, famine, gender inequality, child health and education, and the NREGA. He had conceptualized and drafted the first version of the NREGA.

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. ^[3]He excused himself after the first year both times.

Early life

Jean Drèze is from a prominent Belgian academic family. His father is the economist Jacques Drèze, founder of the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics, at the Université catholique de Louvain.^[4] His brother, Xavier Drèze, was a well-known and influential marketing and consumer research scholar at UCLA.^[5]

He studied Mathematical Economics at the University of Essex in the 1980s and did his PhD (theoretical economics of cost-benefit analysis) at the Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi.^[6]

He has lived in India since 1979 and became an Indian citizen in 2002.

Personal life

He is married to Bela Bhatia, an academic and human right activist from India.

He currently lives in Ranchi.

Career

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.^[7]

It is not coincidence that Amartya Sen coauthored 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".

PROBE Report

A key work widely cited that Dreze worked on as part of a small team was the primary education study of key states in northern India typically referred to by its short name, The PROBE Report, or The Public Report on Basic Education (1999). It remains a key reference due to the lack of similarly comprehensive studies using grassroots development specialists.

Social activism

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.^[8] 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.^[8] 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.^[9] 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.^[8]

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,^[10] 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.

Publications

Books

• Drèze J. and Sen, A.K. 1989. Hunger and Public Action. Oxford University Press.
• (as Jean Delarue) 1990. No.1 Clapham Road: The diary of a squat. Peaceprint.
• Drèze J. and Sen, A. (eds.). 1991. The Political Economy of Hunger. Three volumes. Oxford University Press.
• Ahmad E, Drèze J, Hills J, Sen A K (eds.) 1991. Social Security in Developing Countries. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Drèze J. and Sen, A. 1995. The political Economy of Hunger: selected essays. Clarendon Press. (abdridged)
• Drèze J. and Sen, A.K. 1995. India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity. Oxford University Press.
• Dreze, Jean and Amartya Sen, (eds), 1997. Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
• Drèze J., M. Samson and S. Singh. 1997. The Dam and the Nation: Displacement and Resettlement in the Narmada Valley. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-564004-7.
• A. De and J Drèze. 1999. Public Report on Basic Education in India. The PROBE report. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195648706
• Drèze J. (ed.) 1999. The Economics of Famine. International Library of Critical Writings in Economics. London: Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Bhatia B, J. Drèze & K. Kelly. 2001. War and Peace in the Gulf: Testimonies of the Gulf Peace Team. London: Spokesman Books. [published on the tenth anniversary of the Team's attempt to stop the Gulf War through non-violent occupation].
• Drèze J. and Sen, A.K. 2002. India: Development and Participation. Oxford University Press.
• Drèze J. and Sen, A.K. 2013 An Uncertain Glory, India and Its Contradictions. Penguin.

Articles

See also

• National Advisory Council
• National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA)

References

External links

Wikibooks has more on the topic of: Jean Drèze

• Jean Drèze on TheHindu.com
• Interview on India Together
• Future of Mid-Day Meals.
• Focus On Children Under Six, FOCUS Report