Jean Drèze gave up his Belgian passport to become an Indian citizen. He did it, in part, so he could keep working on India’s poorest villages from the inside, not as an outsider.
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Indian Economy · IndEco0184
Jean Drèze
The Barefoot Economist
1979
Moves to India; later completes his PhD at the Indian Statistical Institute.
2002
Becomes an Indian citizen, giving up his Belgian citizenship.
2005
Conceptualises and drafts the original MGNREGA rural jobs law.
Jun 2026
Receives the Global Inequality Research Award, in Paris.
A Legacy, Even as the Law Changed
Weeks after his Paris award, MGNREGA itself was repealed and replaced — the law he first drafted lived on in a new form.
Must Know
- Jean Drèze was born on 22 January 1959, in Leuven, Belgium. His father, Jacques Drèze, was also a well-known economist.
- He studied mathematical economics at the University of Essex, then completed a PhD in theoretical economics at the Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi.
- He has lived in India since 1979. In 2002, he became an Indian citizen, giving up his Belgian citizenship.
- He is a long-time collaborator of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. Together they wrote several landmark books, including Hunger and Public Action and An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions.
- Drèze is widely credited as the principal author of the original Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which he conceptualised and drafted.
- He has also been a key figure in India’s Right to Information and Right to Food campaigns, and helped shape the National Food Security Act.
- He served on the National Advisory Council, under the UPA government, for one year in its first term and two years in its second.
Good to Know
- His only full-time academic post was at the London School of Economics, in the 1980s. There, he lived among London’s homeless and helped start a squatters’ movement in 1988.
- He wrote a short book about that experience, No. 1 Clapham Road: The Diary of a Squat, under the pseudonym Jean Delarue.
- Drèze often lives and works under the same conditions as the people he studies. For a study of Palanpur village in Uttar Pradesh, he farmed a plot of land and raised animals himself.
- He has also co-authored influential work with other Nobel laureates: with Angus Deaton on nutrition and poverty, and separately with economist Nicholas Stern on policy reform.
- He is currently an honorary professor at the Delhi School of Economics, and a member of Tamil Nadu’s Economic Advisory Council, headed by Nobel laureate Esther Duflo.
- Drèze was also part of the small team behind the influential 1999 PROBE Report, a landmark survey of primary education in northern India.
Test Yourself
Great to Know
- During the 1990-91 Gulf War, Drèze joined a peace camp on the Iraq-Saudi border. His early writing on the war warned about the human cost of sanctions on Iraq.
- He is often called the “Barefoot Economist,” for his deliberately simple lifestyle. In Delhi, he and his wife, researcher Bela Bhatia, lived in a one-room house in a jhuggi settlement.
- He has lived in several Indian cities over the decades: Delhi from 1993 to 2002, then Allahabad until 2014. He currently lives in Ranchi.
Current Affairs
- On 5 June 2026, Drèze received the 2026 Global Inequality Research Award (GiRA), at the World Inequality Conference, Paris School of Economics. (Source: Sciences Po CRIS)
- The award was presented by economists Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty. It was only the second edition of the GiRA; Bina Agarwal and James K. Boyce were its first recipients, in 2024. (Source: Sciences Po CRIS)
- On 1 July 2026, MGNREGA, the law Drèze originally drafted, was itself repealed. It was replaced by the VB–G RAM G Act, 2025, which raised the guaranteed-employment period from 100 to 125 days. See IndEco0140 — MGNREGA and the Viksit Bharat–G RAM G Act.
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