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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | ET Awards 2008-09: Policy Change Agent of the Year- Jean Dreze

ET Awards 2008-09: Policy Change Agent of the Year- Jean Dreze

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published Published on Sep 17, 2009   modified Modified on Sep 17, 2009


Academics can have relevance beyond the printed word and Jean Dreze has proved that this is indeed the case. He has deservedly won the Economic Times’ Policy Change Agent of the Year 2009 for his outstanding work in poverty alleviation and rural employment.

A development economist, Dreze has taken his academic persuasions to the real world — he not only played a major role in designing the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) but on one occasion also got beaten up by vested interests for trying, in the guise of an activist, to get it implemented as intended. For those who came in late, NREGS guarantees 100 days to any able-bodied adult who is willing to volunteer for manual unskilled labour, according to the website of the rural development ministry.

The jury was impressed by Dreze’s commitment to excellence and upliftment of the poor and by his work in conceptualising the NREGS. The scheme has been widely believed to be the reason behind the UPA government’s success in the May elections. The jury was also impressed by his dedication to poverty alleviation shown in his decision to live and work amidst the poor.

Jean Dreze also proves that commitment knows no national boundaries. A Belgian by birth, economist Jean Dreze has spent the better part of his life living and working in India. After 25 years of committed work in India, Dreze became an Indian citizen in 2002.

When it was first proposed NREGS provoked controversy. Its critics worry and still do about an open-ended fiscal commitment. Dreze for his part dismisses such critics as cold-hearted fiscal conservatives. Nonetheless it is now part of the landscape, like social security in western societies. Indeed, NREGS looks set to be undergo a substantial expansion in the UPA’s second innings with urban areas being brought under its fold. It will also play a key role in alleviating the rural distress which threatens to set in because of the drought now afflicting large parts of the country.

While NREGS is the best-known of Dreze’s efforts to translate academic ideas into practice, it will be unfair to reduce his commitment to making practical sense of academics to just that. He has constantly been making interventions in many social issues. His works combine standard economic methods and tools that are used more commonly by anthropologists.

A widely-cited research that Dreze worked on, as part of a small team, was the study of primary education in key states of northern India, typically referred to by its short name — The PROBE Report, or The Public Report on Basic Education (1999). Dreze’s commitment to the people he had made his own and to the much broader understanding that academics must mean something on the ground to be meaningful, explains his participation in the National Advisory Council (NAC).

However, for Dreze, participation in such quasi-political bodies had to have more meaning than being a mere academic exercise, which is why he quit NAC after Sonia Gandhi resigned from the chair following the office-of-profit controversy. When the NAC lost its edge, so did its perceived value in the eyes of this activist-economist.


 


The Economic Times, 25 August, 2009, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Features/ET-Awards-2008-09-Policy-Change-Agent-of-the-Year-Jean-Dreze/articleshow/4931012.cms
 

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