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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Review Of Jean Dreze's Book, Jholawala Economics For Everyone -Maitreesh Ghatak

Review Of Jean Dreze's Book, Jholawala Economics For Everyone -Maitreesh Ghatak

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published Published on Oct 4, 2017   modified Modified on Oct 4, 2017
-NDTV

Jean Dreze's new book, a collection of essays called 'Sense and Solidarity - Jholawala Economics for Everyone', starts with a beautiful and moving description of what he sees from his office in Ranchi University at the crack of dawn: hundreds of informal sector coal-miners in Ranchi trudging miles with heavy loads of coal they have dug up, often from below the land from which they were forcibly displaced. Dreze quotes George Orwell saying all of us owe our comfortable existence to "...poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throat full of coal dust". This sets the tone of the book, where solidarity with the "wretched of the Earth" is the driving force behind the choice of topics.

Now if anyone had to write a book with the word jholawala in the title, that would have to be Dreze, because whatever you might think of his views, he is the uber-jholawala, or to paraphrase ustadon ke ustad, the jholawalon ka jholawala. He is the ultimate scholar-activist, with a laptop in his jhola while he travels all across the country. It is not a one-man show though. He has an impressive band of co-authors, including Nobel Laureate economists Amartya Sen and Angus Deaton, as well his wife Bela Bhatia, also a scholar and activist, his long-term research-collaborator Reetika Khera, and many young scholars.

Jean Dreze is a force of nature. (Disclaimer: as fellow Development Economists with a special focus on India, we share cordial professional relations and follow each other's work. However, we have never had any institutional connections, research collaborations, or done any co-authored work.) Born in an affluent and distinguished Belgian family (his father is a very well-known economic theorist, Jacques Dreze), he has lived in India since the late 70s, earning his PhD at the Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi, and becoming an Indian citizen in 2002. In many ways, his trajectory is the opposite of that of many in the field of Development Economics, a field where Indians are a dominant group. Many of them (myself included) were born in India but did their doctoral research abroad and spent a large part of their career there.

Not just that, Dreze is well known for a Spartan lifestyle, eschewing most of the basic comforts that most educated professionals take for granted. I choose the word Spartan carefully - Dreze is a man of peace but he is also a passionate warrior for causes he writes about in this book. More unusually, he is also a happy warrior. I have had my fair share of arguments and disagreements with him on specific issue over the years but I have seldom seen someone who is more agreeable while disagreeing!

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NDTV, 3 October, 2017, https://www.ndtv.com/opinion/review-of-jean-drezes-book-jholawala-economics-for-everyone-1757748?pfrom=home-opinion


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