Bibek Debroy: An economist who played a key role in public policy across eras
The economist’s passing was widely mourned on Friday, led by Prime Minister Modi and President Droupadi Murmu
Economist and polymath Bibek Debroy, who advised the Modi government on 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 passed away today at 7am due to intestinal obstruction,” the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, where Debroy was being treated, said on Friday.
Chairman of the Prime Minister’s economic advisory council at the time of his passing, Debroy helmed Narendra Modi’s vision of Amrit Kaal, an aspirational plan for a prosperous and self-reliant India. Debroy, as the head of the finance ministry’s expert committee for infrastructure classification and financing framework for Amrit Kaal, aimed to make India a high-tech production economy.
Barely four days ago, Debroy wrote a newspaper column from his hospital bed in which he asked: “There’s a world outside that exists. What if I am not there? What indeed?”
The economist’s passing was widely mourned on Friday, led by Prime Minister Modi and President Droupadi Murmu. Modi wrote on X that Debroy was a “towering scholar” who “through his works” has “left an indelible mark on India’s intellectual landscape”.
President Murmu, in her tribute on X, said “the country has lost an eminent public intellectual who enriched diverse fields, from policy making to translating our great scriptures”. Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman recalled the sweeping breadth of his interests: “ancient texts, Vedic and classical Sanskrit, Devi, Railways”.
He was also a fountain pen enthusiast, and wrote a book on the subject.
As an economist, Debroy was reformist in approach, and advocated a markets-led economic landscape where Schumpeterian “creative destruction” should dismantle old inefficient, economic structures to make way for the new. One of his early books was on antiquated laws, the compliance burden of which he captured in the late 1990s in a column for Business Today magazine aptly titled Red Tape and in a 2000 book, Absurdities of Indian Law.
He was educated in West Bengal’s Ramakrishna Mission School, Narendrapur; Presidency College, Kolkata; Delhi School of Economics and Trinity College, Cambridge.
Between 1997 and 2005, he was the head of the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies, but a 2005 report by him that named Gujarat (Modi was then its chief minister) as India’s top state in an economic freedom index became controversial, and caused him to move on to the Punjab Haryana Delhi Chamber of Commerce and Industry , then think-tank Centre for Policy Research, before he joined Niti Aayog in 2014.
At the federal think-tank , he was instrumental in changing how the Indian Railways, the largest public-sector enterprise, was run. The focus was on minimising the lumbering social cost of running the behemoth through what economists like to call “efficiency gains” from privatisation. In 2017, he co-authored Indian Railways: The Weaving of a National Tapestry, an engaging history of Indian Railways.
In a career spanning nearly 40 years, Debroy held various academic positions in Presidency College, Kolkata (1979-83), Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune (1983-87) and the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, Delhi (1987-93).
As chair of a federal committee, Debroy recommended “concessioning” of commercial operations of train service such as Rajdhani and Shatabdi to private firms. The railways is now weighing a plan to run 150 train services on a public-private partnership mode, a strategy that came under sharp criticism from the Opposition.
According to the Debroy committee’s estimates, the railways will need capital investment of nearly ₹50 lakh crore until 2030 for expanding its network and ratcheting up capacity to meet growing requirements of passenger and freight services. To bridge this gap, it recommended a private-public partnership (PPP) model under which railway land is to be offered at a concession to private firms.
Reforms in public sectors offering mass employment, as opposed to those in financial sectors, have never been easy. The PPP rail model, recommended by Debroy in 2020, is still in the works.
As the pandemic saw a major shift in global supply chains and “reshoring” of factories, stoked by China’s troubles, Debroy advised the government to double down on Make in India, a plan to boost local manufacturing in Asia’s third-largest economy.
In his last book, Inked in India (2002), Debroy lamented the loss of India’s competitive advantage in making what are called “petty goods”, relatively low-tech everyday items of mass consumption, which are the best provider of jobs.
In the book, the author traced the history of fountain pens in India, from the writing instrument’s strong manufacturing base during the colonial period to the post-Independence economic policies which “eroded that competitive advantage and led to economic churn and the exit of foreign firms from the country”. It is one of Debroy’s most prominent books on the economy, that goes beyond the “nostalgia and lost sheen of fountain pens” to tackle the “the impact of policy on local enterprise”.
“He (Debroy) heralded policies for a new economy. I was amazed by his patience, his insights into the economy and ability to explain complex economic issues in simple terms,” said Amitabh Kant, India’s G20 Sherpa.
Equal parts bold and controversial, Debroy recommended imposing taxes on rich farmers in 2017, citing historical research that showed cultivators did pay some form of tax from their agricultural income in various periods of history.
Much to the chagrin of the Opposition, in August 2023, Debroy wrote in a newspaper column that the Indian Constitution bore colonial legacy and needed an overhaul. “A tweak here and another there won’t do.”
More than anything else, Debroy’s penchant for writing limericks , a deep knowledge of ancient Indian texts, Sanskrit and scholarship of Hinduism attracted wide popularity beyond the confines of public policy.
A multi-volume masterly translation, not mere retelling, of the Mahabharata remains a Debroy classic. Starting in 2010, he translated the entire critical edition of the Mahabharata of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune.
After this, came the Harivamsha, an appendix to the Mahabharata, followed up by the Baroda critical edition of the Valmiki Ramayana. Debroy wasn’t content with translating the 19 Mahapuranas in an abridged form and nurtured plans to translate the entire texts.
There were more translations of epics: the Bhagavata Purana, Markandeya Purana, Brahma Purana, Vishnu Purana, Shiva Purana, and Brahmanda Purana. In 2020, as India shuttered itself during the pandemic, Debroy hunkered down to write Bhagavad Gita for Millennials.
The Gita, an epic that centres on dharma, or ethical conduct, is considered a foundational text in Hinduism. “But the millennial may find the Bhagwat Gita laborious and lengthy. Debroy therefore keeps his version fast-paced but without sacrificing its soul,” wrote Reginald Simpson, the author of Blackwell Book of Hindu Texts, in a review.
Debroy also wrote a daily limerick for Mint, HT’s sister publication, a testimony to his dry sense of political humour. For instance: “If you happen to sin, get ready to take it on the chin. The GST rate will be hefty, forcing you to be thrifty. And sending your budget into a tailspin.”
Renowned economist Ajit Ranade said: “Bibek had a sharp mind and tongue, and always liked to call a spade a spade. One could have very open and frank conversations and fierce debates with him. His caustic words could sometimes be difficult to absorb. It is perhaps poetic that his first job after coming back from England was at Gokhale Institute, and four decades later he returned as its Chancellor”.
As news of his demise broke, many remembered him as an economist who understood the country’s cultural milieu and social ethos, which helped him to harmonise economic plans with local conditions. “A deep understanding of Indian culture and society provided Debroy with insights on how India should modernise and develop,” said Ishwar Anand, an economist with Delhi University.
But to honour him as merely an economist or head of a think tank would do injustice to someone who was a classic Renaissance Man.