Economist and polymath Bibek Debroy, who suggested the Modi authorities on insurance policies for over a decade and dazzled as a scholar-translator of classical Indian literature in Sanskrit, died in New Delhi, aged 69. “Bibek Debroy handed away right this moment at 7am resulting from intestinal obstruction,” the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, the place Debroy was being handled, stated on Friday.
Chairman of the Prime Minister’s financial advisory council on the time of his passing, Debroy helmed Narendra Modi’s imaginative and prescient of Amrit Kaal, an aspirational plan for a affluent and self-reliant India. Debroy, as the top of the finance ministry’s knowledgeable committee for infrastructure classification and financing framework for Amrit Kaal, aimed to make India a high-tech manufacturing economic system.
Barely 4 days in the past, Debroy wrote a newspaper column from his hospital mattress during which he requested: “There’s a world exterior that exists. What if I’m not there? What certainly?”
The economist’s passing was broadly mourned on Friday, led by Prime Minister Modi and President Droupadi Murmu. Modi wrote on X that Debroy was a “towering scholar” who “by means of his works” has “left an indelible mark on India’s mental panorama”.
President Murmu, in her tribute on X, stated “the nation has misplaced an eminent public mental who enriched numerous fields, from coverage making to translating our nice scriptures”. Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman recalled the sweeping breadth of his pursuits: “historic texts, Vedic and classical Sanskrit, Devi, Railways”.
He was additionally a fountain pen fanatic, and wrote a e-book on the topic.
As an economist, Debroy was reformist in method, and advocated a markets-led financial panorama the place Schumpeterian “inventive destruction” ought to dismantle outdated inefficient, financial constructions to make approach for the brand new. Considered one of his early books was on antiquated legal guidelines, the compliance burden of which he captured within the late Nineties in a column for Enterprise Immediately journal aptly titled Crimson Tape and in a 2000 e-book, Absurdities of Indian Regulation.
He was educated in West Bengal’s Ramakrishna Mission College, Narendrapur; Presidency School, Kolkata; Delhi College of Economics and Trinity School, Cambridge.
Between 1997 and 2005, he was the top of the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Up to date Research, however a 2005 report by him that named Gujarat (Modi was then its chief minister) as India’s high state in an financial freedom index grew to become controversial, and brought on him to maneuver on to the Punjab Haryana Delhi Chamber of Commerce and Business , then think-tank Centre for Coverage Analysis, earlier than he joined Niti Aayog in 2014.
On the federal think-tank , he was instrumental in altering how the Indian Railways, the most important public-sector enterprise, was run. The main focus was on minimising the lumbering social value of operating the behemoth by means of what economists prefer to name “effectivity positive aspects” from privatisation. In 2017, he co-authored Indian Railways: The Weaving of a Nationwide Tapestry, an attractive historical past of Indian Railways.
In a profession spanning practically 40 years, Debroy held numerous tutorial positions in Presidency School, Kolkata (1979-83), Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune (1983-87) and the Indian Institute of Overseas Commerce, Delhi (1987-93).
As chair of a federal committee, Debroy beneficial “concessioning” of business operations of practice service akin to Rajdhani and Shatabdi to non-public companies. The railways is now weighing a plan to run 150 practice providers on a public-private partnership mode, a technique that got here below sharp criticism from the Opposition.
In response to the Debroy committee’s estimates, the railways will want capital funding of practically ₹50 lakh crore till 2030 for increasing its community and ratcheting up capability to fulfill rising necessities of passenger and freight providers. To bridge this hole, it beneficial a private-public partnership (PPP) mannequin below which railway land is to be supplied at a concession to non-public companies.
Reforms in public sectors providing mass employment, versus these in monetary sectors, have by no means been simple. The PPP rail mannequin, beneficial by Debroy in 2020, continues to be within the works.
Because the pandemic noticed a significant shift in international provide chains and “reshoring” of factories, stoked by China’s troubles, Debroy suggested the federal government to double down on Make in India, a plan to spice up native manufacturing in Asia’s third-largest economic system.
In his final e-book, Inked in India (2002), Debroy lamented the lack of India’s aggressive benefit in making what are referred to as “petty items”, comparatively low-tech on a regular basis gadgets of mass consumption, that are one of the best supplier of jobs.
Within the e-book, the creator traced the historical past of fountain pens in India, from the writing instrument’s robust manufacturing base in the course of the colonial interval to the post-Independence financial insurance policies which “eroded that aggressive benefit and led to financial churn and the exit of overseas companies from the nation”. It’s certainly one of Debroy’s most outstanding books on the economic system, that goes past the “nostalgia and misplaced sheen of fountain pens” to sort out the “the influence of coverage on native enterprise”.
“He (Debroy) heralded insurance policies for a brand new economic system. I used to be amazed by his endurance, his insights into the economic system and skill to elucidate complicated financial points in easy phrases,” stated Amitabh Kant, India’s G20 Sherpa.
Equal elements daring and controversial, Debroy beneficial imposing taxes on wealthy farmers in 2017, citing historic analysis that confirmed cultivators did pay some type of tax from their agricultural earnings in numerous durations of historical past.
A lot to the chagrin of the Opposition, in August 2023, Debroy wrote in a newspaper column that the Indian Structure bore colonial legacy and wanted an overhaul. “A tweak right here and one other there received’t do.”
Greater than the rest, Debroy’s penchant for writing limericks , a deep information of historic Indian texts, Sanskrit and scholarship of Hinduism attracted vast recognition past the confines of public coverage.
A multi-volume masterly translation, not mere retelling, of the Mahabharata stays a Debroy traditional. Beginning in 2010, he translated the whole essential version of the Mahabharata of the Bhandarkar Oriental Analysis Institute, Pune.
After this, got here the Harivamsha, an appendix to the Mahabharata, adopted up by the Baroda essential version of the Valmiki Ramayana. Debroy wasn’t content material with translating the 19 Mahapuranas in an abridged type and nurtured plans to translate the whole texts.
There have been extra translations of epics: the Bhagavata Purana, Markandeya Purana, Brahma Purana, Vishnu Purana, Shiva Purana, and Brahmanda Purana. In 2020, as India shuttered itself in the course of the pandemic, Debroy hunkered down to put in writing Bhagavad Gita for Millennials.
The Gita, an epic that centres on dharma, or moral conduct, is taken into account a foundational textual content in Hinduism. “However the millennial could discover the Bhagwat Gita laborious and prolonged. Debroy subsequently retains his model fast-paced however with out sacrificing its soul,” wrote Reginald Simpson, the creator of Blackwell E-book of Hindu Texts, in a assessment.
Debroy additionally wrote a each day limerick for Mint, HT’s sister publication, a sworn statement to his dry sense of political humour. As an illustration: “In case you occur to sin, get able to take it on the chin. The GST fee can be hefty, forcing you to be thrifty. And sending your funds right into a tailspin.”
Famend economist Ajit Ranade stated: “Bibek had a pointy thoughts and tongue, and at all times preferred to name a spade a spade. One might have very open and frank conversations and fierce debates with him. His caustic phrases might generally be troublesome to soak up. It’s maybe poetic that his first job after getting back from England was at Gokhale Institute, and 4 many years later he returned as its Chancellor”.
As information of his demise broke, many remembered him as an economist who understood the nation’s cultural milieu and social ethos, which helped him to harmonise financial plans with native situations. “A deep understanding of Indian tradition and society offered Debroy with insights on how India ought to modernise and develop,” stated Ishwar Anand, an economist with Delhi College.
However to honour him as merely an economist or head of a suppose tank would do injustice to somebody who was a traditional Renaissance Man.
