The Belgian-born economist swept up in India's Cockroach protests

Jean Drèze on the 'shocking' inequalities behind the country's narrative of success

During a crackdown on protesters in New Delhi last month, police detained a tall, lean white man with a wispy beard and infectious smile. As journalists crowded around him, one repeatedly demanded: "Who are you, where have you come from?"

The encounter went viral, with social media users mocking the reporter's ignorance and recounting Jean Drèze's extraordinary credentials. The 67-year-old Belgian-born economist has spent decades among India's poorest communities, not merely studying poverty but living in their conditions.

Despite collaborations with Nobel laureates Amartya Sen and Sir Angus Deaton, Drèze has eschewed academic trappings and comfort. He has worked on and campaigned for landmark Indian welfare laws, including a guarantee of 100 days of employment for rural households, food security legislation and free school meals credited with boosting attendance. Fluent in Hindi, Drèze became a naturalised Indian citizen in 2002.

The historian Ramachandra Guha once described him as "an outstanding fieldworker, who probably knows the villages of India better than any purely desi (local) social scientist. By foot or on bicycle he has toured much of northern India." Economist Pranab Bardhan has likened him to "Jesus Christ with a laptop". Earlier this year, Drèze received the Global Inequality Research Award.

True to form, Drèze has arranged for us a "very simple lunch" at an NGO supporting marginalised tribal forest dwellers. It is more than an hour outside Ranchi, the capital of the eastern coal belt state of Jharkhand, one of India's poorest. The meal "will be virtually free even if you insist on paying for it", Drèze tells me by email. "I don't know if you are allowed to befriend your victims in advance, but if you are, we could perhaps poke around outside Ranchi?"

Our exploration begins in the lobby of the modern western chain hotel where I'm staying. Drèze appears in a faded blue fleece, a short-sleeved black kurta and sandals.

The hotel is not Drèze's scene. He has occupied a one-bedroom abode in Ranchi for 14 years, living off book royalties and occasional newspaper columns. His visiting professorship at a local university is unpaid. Bardhan, who has hosted him in Kolkata, once recalled his preference for sleeping on the floor. Drèze tells me to "take all these things with a pinch of salt . . . but it could have happened. I do like hard surfaces to sleep, actually, because I get backaches on mattresses."

They have to find something to do otherwise they won't survive . . . mainly they have to fall back on low-paid, hazardous, repetitive jobs

Soft-spoken Drèze is modest to an extreme. "The myth that I'm hoping you will help to dispel is this idea that I'm the so-called architect of the [rural employment] act because it's not quite true at all -- it was a collective effort."

Today, he has hired a car and driver for our "pot luck" tour of rural Jharkhand and some of the harsh realities glossed over in the narrative of India's rise. As we set off, Drèze hands me sheets of statistics illustrating the shortcomings of India's state schools, which are driving wealthier parents towards costly private education. More than 40 per cent of Jharkhand's government primary schools are staffed by a single teacher, a figure that has been on a steady rise. "It's really shocking," he says.

Leaving Ranchi, the roads flanked by rice paddy fields deteriorate and our car careens around potholes the size of bomb craters. "This whole area . . . is almost completely appropriated from these Adivasis quite often against the law," says Drèze, referring to indigenous tribal and forest communities, many systematically displaced by mining and development.

After more than an hour, we reach a primary school where children sit apparently unsupervised across three classrooms. Drèze finds the sole teacher, who has been there since 2011. She tells him repeated requests for more staff go unanswered. Changes to funding rules this year have disrupted school lunches for months, forcing her to find money to feed the children. "This is the kind of thing that plagues the system," says Drèze.

At another stop, he is in his element, sitting barefoot with Adivasi villagers describing their struggle to secure land rights. "I like spending time with these people," he beams. "You could see that they could talk for hours." But lunch beckons.

We turn down a track to the woodland field office of the Institute of Community Forest Governance. Seated on plastic chairs beneath a corrugated-iron-roofed building, plates bearing chapattis, rice, dal, curried cauliflower and tomato chutney, accompanied by crispy papads, curd and steel tumblers of water, are served.

Tearing off chunks of chapatti to scoop up the wholesome and delicious fare, I ask about Drèze's upbringing in Leuven and then Wavre, not far from Brussels. His father, Jacques, was a distinguished economist and the first president of the European Economic Association. He recalls a "very happy childhood" with his four brothers. "The fact that my father was eminent was something that we didn't know."

Growing up during the 1960s, "it was a time of hope", Drèze says. "I was certainly not drawn to business or finance, and I had to change the world." Although he became passionate about development and social justice, Drèze sought a grounding in economics, which he studied in the UK before pursuing a PhD at the Indian Statistical Institute in Delhi. "In those days, India was like a remote, exotic land," he says jovially. "It sounded far more interesting to me than to go to Harvard or Oxford."

India was meant to be a temporary fling. "I had ideas of going to China." But a turning point came when an umbrella repairman he had befriended was turned away by the institute's guards, likely because he was Dalit -- once known as "untouchables" in India's repressive caste system. "That's when I made up my mind," Drèze recalls. "I left the campus and I went to stay with them [at a local shanty]."

In India, he was "bowled over" by Sen's 1981 work Poverty and Famines, which challenged prevailing explanations for starvation. They began corresponding and eventually became longstanding collaborators. Drèze says he "became a bit more of a proper scholar" under Sen, who himself later joked Drèze "did 90 per cent of the work and I got 90 per cent of the credit".

In 1986, Drèze returned to the UK to work on his first book with Sen: Hunger and Public Action. He taught at the London School of Economics and at one point lived in a squat in an abandoned children's hospital near Oval. He chronicled life among "dossers, piss-heads, weirdos, prostitutes, loafers, kleptomaniacs, beggars, shoplifters, Don Quixotes, and only a few people who would be regarded as 'normal' by the rest of society".

Drèze's diary, No. 1 Clapham Road: The Diary of a Squat, brims with cheery optimism in the face of sporadic violence and even after someone defecated on his sleeping bag. What did he take from his time at the squat? "A kind of basic faith in people, not that they are angels," Drèze says. "They still have the basic capacity for goodness and great solidarity."

Nevertheless, he was drawn back to India, quitting his gig at LSE and immersing himself in village research. Chafing at restrictions on activism as a foreigner, he applied for Indian citizenship. The country does not allow dual nationality, so he surrendered his Belgian passport to the bewilderment of embassy officials. "They couldn't understand," he giggles. "They had no choice, the decision was mine."

The central argument of Drèze's work is that, despite India's expanding economy, with GDP rising above 7 per cent annually since the Covid pandemic, at the fastest rate of any major country, hundreds of millions of people continue to be left behind. Despite considerable progress since the famines and exploitation of British colonial rule, Drèze has pointed out that life for many remains "extremely harsh".

He blames entrenched gender inequality -- participation by women in the workforce remains below Saudi Arabia -- caste discrimination and under-investment in public health and education, holding back the vast underclass of the country's 1.5bn people as the top of the pyramid prospers.

"Policymakers are very focused on the more capital-intensive sectors" and subsidising large conglomerates, he argues. Surely India needs corporate champions to drive investment and job growth? "Some of these investments are necessary, but they don't create much employment and I don't think it's their objective either," Drèze claims. "This is why the system is not changing; it works pretty well for the privileged minority."

Drèze now criss-crosses India by train and bus, campaigning and "firefighting" on social issues. His partner, Bela Bhatia, a human rights lawyer based in the central state of Chhattisgarh, works with Adivasi and Dalit communities facing violence and displacement in the resource-rich region, dangerous work that has seen her threatened repeatedly. "She meets all the time with villagers who have been thrown in jail, raped, tortured, everything," says Drèze.

Corruption remains pervasive. He recalls a recent conversation with a road contractor. "I asked him: 'Do you do honest work or do you cheat?'"

"He said, 'I cheat. I take a 30 per cent cut for myself, I give 30 per cent bribes to different government [officials] and 40 per cent for work' . . . that's also a reason why the schools are in bad shape because so much money has been spent on buildings that collapse after a few years," Drèze explains.

These failings have fuelled this year's protests set off by the Cockroach Janta Party, which began as an online satirical movement against graft in India's education system, channelling youthful discontent with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government. India, like elsewhere around the world and its South Asian neighbours, faces a restive Gen Z. Since then, grievances have broadened to allegations of mass voter deletions designed to favour the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

When he was picked up by police in Delhi last month, Drèze, who shares deep concerns about the estimated removal of 130mn names from electoral rolls, was detained alongside about 40 young men, many of them Muslim, who he says did not attend the protest. When three female associates were offered release along with him, they refused to leave without the others. "I've never seen the kind of police deployment that we saw," he says.

Drèze sees a deep malaise behind the unrest. "Aspirations have increased quite a lot at the moment, people want to have a meaningful job," he says. "For the majority . . . they go through this very poor schooling system and then they end up getting a useless degree from a small college without learning much -- there was a readiness for some kind of eruption."

Drèze's detractors argue that his activism has clouded his economic research. He disagrees. "Objectivity is willingness to recognise the facts even if they are inconvenient . . . I think you can strive for objectivity even if you have some commitments."

"I don't think that the academic world is very neutral anyway. I mean, it's kind of quite closely integrated with all the centres of power . . . but I don't dismiss mainstream economics at all."

Still, Drèze believes economists undervalue first-hand experience. "I find it funny, how many economists have seen the inside of a factory, for example?" he says. "I suspect it's a minority."

As he mixes rice and dal with his fingers, I mention historian Guha's description of Drèze as "an academic who lives austerely -- perhaps too austerely" and ask whether his lifestyle helps deflect white saviour accusations?

"I'm not an ascetic," he insists. "I don't feel deprived. I have the basics, I'm not hungry, I am not cold in the winter . . . I'm not like Gandhi into minimalism, because I think that can be quite problematic."

"I came here to learn, I certainly didn't come here with a saviour complex," he laughs.

As I get up to pay Seema, the NGO's cook, Drèze spoons a few last mouthfuls of curd before we head back to Ranchi. The drive offers more time to probe his views on India's direction.

Drèze acknowledges the improvements in Indians' lives. The World Bank estimates almost half a billion have escaped poverty between 2011 and 2023, with the proportion living on less than $4.20 a day falling from 57.7 per cent to 16.1 per cent.

But prosperity remains unevenly distributed. A 2024 World Inequality Lab study provocatively described a "'Billionaire Raj' headed by India's modern bourgeoisie is now more unequal than the British Raj". Last year, it found little progress: the richest 10 per cent capture about 58 per cent of national income, against 15 per cent for the bottom half.

Nor has growth delivered the jobs Indians want, Drèze argues. "They have to find something to do because otherwise they won't survive . . . mainly they have to fall back on low-paid, hazardous, repetitive jobs."

He also doubts Modi's Viksit Bharat ambition to make India a developed nation by 2047, the centenary of independence. "It's 20 years from now, it's not a lot of time," he says. "I think some problems are too deep."

Drèze returns to India's chronic under-investment in public education and health, as well as the deep disadvantages of caste, with Dalits still facing exclusion and violence despite constitutional protections and affirmative action. Despite rising expenditure, education spending remains about 4 per cent of GDP, below the government's 6 per cent target, while health receives just 1.8 per cent.

"Some things have improved compared to 50 years ago -- life is better, I think, in many ways for most people, so it's not like we're going backward," he adds. "We are going backward right now in terms of democracy and civil liberties."

Despite the Cockroach protests, Drèze is troubled by the shrinking space for dissent, particularly in India's media, much of it owned by powerful businessmen. "Certainly a lot of people find it difficult," he says. "I still, by and large, say what I feel, but I get less space for it," he says, citing fewer invites to TV studios.

As our journey nears its end, the car horn blaring at the thickening traffic, I ask Drèze what economists most misunderstand about India. "This basic point," he says after a long silence, "that poor people don't have a say and that they really don't count for much. I think that's not necessarily well understood, certainly not by visiting development economists."

"They come and they interact with top bureaucrats . . . they get the impression that the government is going out of its way to do something and they don't get an inkling of the caste system because it's not really visible, at least to them in those circles," he adds.

Pulling up at a dusty junction on Ranchi's outskirts, we reflect on his life's interesting turns and the roads not travelled, including his choice to give up his cushy job at LSE and return to India all those years ago.

"That was a hard decision, because I could have had a career there," Drèze says as he gets off near a roadside stall selling fresh sugar cane juice and overlooked by a billboard advertising luxury apartments. "But I came back and I'm glad I came back."

Chris Kay is the FT's Mumbai bureau chief