The Belgian-born Jean Dreze tackles social development in India
By Annavajhula J C Bose, Shri Ram College of Commerce*
In the early 1980’s, while studying at the Centre For Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram, every day I admired the simple, cost-effective exposed brick buildings of contrasting shapes and sizes on the campus. The architect was Laurie Baker (1917-2007) who also designed several orphanages, churches and government buildings and volunteered at a leper colony. Born in England, and inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, he spent most of his life in India.
Like Baker, India attracts numerous foreigners devoted to improving the lives of the poor in the country. The most famous of them is Mother Theresa (1910-1997,) now a saint of the Roman Catholic church. Of Albanian descent, she worked as a nun in Kolkata, comforting the homeless dying on the city’s streets.
Today, among academics, the Belgian-born Jean Dreze appeals to me as more Indian than many Indian professors.
Policies for helping the poor
As an economist, Dreze is an enthusiastic crusader for policies that improve the lives of the poor in India. His recommendations for social safety measures are more important today as the COVID-19 pandemic destroys the jobs of hundreds of millions of Indians.
An Indian citizen, Dreze, 61, played a key role in the conception of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, implemented in 1995, helped draft the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, implemented since 2006, and also contributed to the Right to Information Act and the National Food Security Act, all of which are programs implemented by the Government of India.
Giving up a life of western comforts
I have eagerly attended several presentations by Dreze. In January, for instance, we chatted briefly after he spoke about the importance of public action on social policy at Miranda House, Delhi University. I invited him to speak to a group of my students at the Shri Ram College of Commerce in Delhi. We sat under a tree on the campus and the students and I found Dreze to be an easy going, like-able person.
He got his B.A. in mathematical economics from the University of Essex, UK, and a Ph.D. from the Indian Statistical Institute. He is an author of several books, including four with Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, who is at Harvard University. Dreze taught at the London School of Economics. But, like St. Theresa and Baker, he gave up the comforts of a life in Western Europe.
With his partner Bela Bhatia, Dreze has lived in India for the last 40 years, in one-room tenement housing among the poor. He is fluent in Hindi, with only a slight accent, and travels all over the country by trains and buses rather than airline flights. He is an honorary professor at the Delhi School of Economics and a visiting professor at Ranchi University in Jharkhand, Bihar, though he takes no salary.
Strong ethical values
Dreze’s research focuses on hunger, famine, gender inequality, child health and education. An optimist, he aims to bring about change in these areas through democratic action - public debate, the media, the courts, the electoral process, and street action. He does not accept funds from foundations who dictate how researchers should conduct their work and want them to avoid criticizing the government, companies and business owners.
In 2016, for instance, he quit the board of the Economic & Political Weekly because it disagreed with the editor’s plans for a book and a documentary to celebrate the magazine’s 50th anniversary. ““I have never seen a birthday cause so much unhappiness,” Dreze told The Wire.
Focus on solving problems
In 2017, the Oxford University Press published a collection of Dreze’s essays as Sense and Solidarity- Jholawala Economics for Everyone. The book is based on insights from primary empirical data on issues like food security, healthcare and the rights of children. The data is drawn from field surveys conducted since 2000, with help from student volunteers. For the students, mainly from urban areas, it was hard work without pay. But they had the rich experience of observing the daily struggles of peasants, tribals, workers and migrants against poverty, brutal labor contractors, and the indifference of the bureaucracy. Also, they got to learn about economic, data and policy analysis from a world class master.
Dreze supplements data from field surveys with public hearings, social auditing and similar practical activities. The facts in the book expose the bunkum mythology about social policy cultivated by some Indian scholars and media pundits. The fallacies he points out include that, “First, India is in danger of becoming a nanny state, with lavish and unsustainable levels of social spending. Second, social spending is largely a waste—unproductive ‘handouts’ that do not even reach the poor due to corruption and inefficiency. Third, this wasteful extravaganza is the work of a bunch of old-fashioned Nehruvian socialists and assorted jholawalas (intellectuals with cloth bags slung over their shoulders) who took the country down the garden path during the last ten years. Fourth, the electorate has rejected this entire approach—people want growth, not entitlements.”
Importance of welfare schemes during COVID-19
If anything, Dreze notes, India is among the world champions of social under-spending with regard to health, education, and social security. And the corporate sector tends to be hostile to even this social under-spending, if only because it means higher taxes, or higher interest rates, or fewer handouts or “incentives” for business. “Corporate lobbies, already influential under the (Congress Party led United Progressive Alliance) UPA government--remember the guy who said that the Congress (party) was his dukaan (racket)?—are all the more gung-ho now that their man, Narendra Modi, is at the helm,” writes Dreze. “Even a casual reading of recent editorials in the business media suggests that they have high expectations of devastating ‘reforms’ in the social sector. That is what the mythology of social policy is really about…What is disturbing is how government policy is now aligned with the interests of these business lobbies.”
In March, soon after the nationwide lock-down to contain the spread of COVID-19, in a column for The Hindu, Dreze once again stressed the importance of social security measures. Due to unemployment pay and other social benefits from the government, “The average household in, say, Canada or Italy can take a lock-down in its stride (for some time at least),” he wrote. But since “the staying power of the Indian poor is virtually nil,” there is urgent need for pensions, free food rations and meals, rural employment and other programs.
Alleged Naxalites
In 2016, Dreze and Bela Bhatia were accused of being Naxalites (Indian Maoist groups) and harassed in Chattisgarh. This was reportedly because Bhatia helped some tribal women in the state to lodge a police complaint of rape and sexual violence against employees of a local security force.
Those who know Dreze and Bhatia say they are both peaceful activists who oppose violence by the Naxalites as well as by the police. In fact, in 2011 the Naxalites put up posters in Jharkhand state threatening Dreze and others for publicly criticizing the killing of Niyamat Ansari. A friend of Dreze, Ansari was killed in Jharkhand reportedly by a Maoist squad, who teamed up with certain local corrupt contractors and officials. Just a few days earlier, Ansari had courageously exposed some local corrupt deals.
In March 2019, Dreze was briefly detained for organizing a Right to Food public meeting in Jharkhand, allegedly without permission from the police.
A fearless bare-foot economist
Today Dreze faces a far bigger challenge since he speaks fearlessly about the reality he sees. He is a vocal critic of Hindu nationalism, which he views as the revolt of the upper castes against the egalitarian demands of a democracy.
In August 2019, he was part of a four-member investigative team, which included two members from Communist Parties, that visited Kashmir and and produced a written and video-documented report Kashmir Caged. The report said that, following a lock-down imposed by the Government of India, Muslims in Kashmir view their loss of liberty with “intense and unanimous anger.” During their visit, an official of the Bharatiya Janata Party which rules India, reportedly told Dreze “We won’t let anti-nationals like you do your work here. I am warning you.”
It is likely that political parties and other groups seek to use Dreze’s global academic reputation, his popularity in India as a bare-foot economist serving the poor and his brave and incisive analysis to pursue their own agenda. Even so, what Ramachandra Guha, a leading Indian historian noted in The Telegraph, about Dreze’s Sense & Solidarity, applies to all of Dreze’s work as an economist: “The prose is always clear, the analysis sharp but rarely polemical. Anyone with any interest in the fate of democracy and development in India should buy the book at once.”
