W hen his daytime job was putting together a blueprint for transforming Indian Railways, he combined it with translating a complete 10-volume Mahabharata in English — only the second Indian to do so.
When he was roped in by the finance ministry to research and write a series of reports on legal reforms in India, he also produced some of the most prolific works on India’s negotiations in several rounds of WTO talks. As if the complicated trade talks and legal documents weren’t challenging enough, he would be out on weekends teaching chess to school kids in Delhi.
Bibek Debroy, 69, a polymath in the truest sense of the word, passed away at AIIMS Delhi on Friday morning. He was suffering from heart-related ailments. With his undying curiosity and relentless pursuit of knowledge, he created a body of work that defies categorisation. He was chairman of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister. In his tribute, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said: “Dr Bibek Debroy Ji was a towering scholar, well-versed in diverse domains like economics, history, culture, politics, spirituality and more. Through his works, he left an indelible mark on India’s intellectual landscape. Beyond his contributions to public policy, he enjoyed working on our ancient texts, making them accessible to the youth.”
Debroy’s early work was in theoretical and empirical economics, specialising in trade. Keen on studying physics at the Presidency College, Kolkata, he was nudged to opt for economics by his father. He did his master’s from Delhi School of Economics and pursued PhD from Trinity college, Cambridge. A die-hard believer in ‘freemarket economy with well thought-out regulation’, Debroy authored columns and books on subjects as eclectic as history of the fountain pen to absurdities of Indian laws, and from ‘DNA and RNA of corruption in India’ to dogs in Indian mythology. His belief in the free market came from his experience of growing up in what he called a shortage economy. He would recall how he had to wait for years to buy an HMT watch or get an MTNL phone connection in the 1970s and 80s.
In the last decade, his most profound work was in the field of translating Indian scriptures. Apart from translating the unabridged Mahabharata into English in 10 volumes, he translated Ramayana in three volumes, followed by the Harivamsa and the Vedas. He translated six Puranas in different volumes, though in a column written for Indian Express dated Oct 28, he mentioned that his work on Puranas wasn’t finished. Other than 19th century scholar Manmatha Nath Dutt, he is the only other person to have translated both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, in unabridged form, into English.
From its inception in Jan 2015 until June 2019, Debroy was a member of the NITI Aayog. While there, he made a strong case for taxing agricultural income of rich farmers, arguing that tax-free treatment of farm income had become a growing source of tax evasion. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 2015. In her remembrance tweet, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said: “As chairman of EAC-PM, he profusely participated in policy making. His interests, inter alia, were — ancient texts, Vedic and classical Sanskrit, Devi, Railways … His book Sarama and Her Children showed his uncanny knack in extracting nuggets from our ancient texts. Bibek, you had so much more to do and to complete— for all our sake! Farewell!”
Debroy believed in destiny and higher power. Two decades ago — in Jan 2004 — he had what he later called a brush with death. His heart attack was misdiagnosed and delayed treatment led to several days in ICU. He came out of the hospital with a resolve to write 12 books in a year. He wrote 15! An economist who was known to speak his mind, Debroy stepped down as chancellor of the Pune-based Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics on what he had termed “moral grounds”.
His resignation came after the Bombay high court allowed Ajit Ranade to continue as vice chancellor. Ranade was removed as VC by Debroy after a report had concluded that his appointment was not legally tenable as he did not fulfil the criteria. Debroy had also courted controversy for inviting the editor of Organiser to a 2002 conference when he was director of the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies. In 2004, a study on the economic rating of states, which ranked Gujarat on top, prompted Congress brass to ask him to get all reports published by the institute to be vetted. Debroy did not agree to the proposal and resigned. In a brutally honest assessment of his life in a piece he wrote on Oct 28, he said this about his legacy: “…Had a role in the rat race, was temporarily read and passed into oblivion, buried in journal archives.” On this count, Debroy will be proven wrong.
