Debroy's parting message for the economy

"Why don't you add Delhi School of Economics to your X (Twitter) profile, it will keep the trolls away; they assume you are from JNU", Bibek Debroy said to me abruptly. He was answering my questions on economic policy in an interview during the Modi government's first tenure. He was right. I did change my Twitter profile subsequently, and it did magically turn away most trolls. What surprised me, though, was that he had noticed the trolling and that it had worried him enough for him to come up with an effective solution. Prolific author and columnist, a pro-markets economist who had been Prime Minister Narendra Modi's economic advisory council's chairman since 2017, a translator of ancient Sanskrit texts, a chess aficionado, and a multi-faceted personality, Debroy passed away last month. The government has lost its most important public voice on the economy; the public discourse, an influential political economy commentator. Debroy's newspaper op-eds were often preludes to coming big changes. India's politics changed this year, not long after he argued in his Mint column that India's Constitution wasn't working too well and ought to be changed. In 2012, he wrote a piece in The Economic Times arguing that the government led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had found resolve to perform, changed its finance minister, averted a sovereign rating default, and

This article was originally published on December 01, 2024.