Bibek Debroy and the unbearable lightness of being an economist

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Seeing that I prefer fountain pens, Bibek Debroy suggested that I should write an economic history of India, telling the story through the decline of fountain pens manufacturing post-Independence. Interesting idea, but it doesn’t excite me, I replied politely, grateful for the encouragement.

He subsequently mentioned this meeting in an op-ed, and later also wrote the book with a co-author. Fountain pens delighted him, and he was proud of his collection. But apart from an aficionado, he was a fluent user of the pen’s might, which made him an influential political economy commentator.

With his untimely death, the government has lost its most important public voice on the economy. Its chief spokesperson on the economy, Arun Jaitley, died in 2019. Debroy was one of the two individuals it has looked to since then for communicating its point of view, and shaping the public discourse.

Debroy’s newspaper op-eds, written at the rate of nearly one a day, were often preludes to big changes ahead. India’s politics changed this year, not long after he argued in a Mint ope-ed that the Constitution wasn’t working too well and needed change. In 2012, he wrote a piece in The Economic Times arguing that the government led by then prime minister Manmohan Singh had found the resolve to perform, averted a sovereign-rating drop and ended its “policy paralysis." If the image still stuck, as Debroy wrote, a key reason was the opposition’s noisy political campaign.

It’s probably why Lutyens’ Delhi was so puzzled in June 2014, when, barely days after being sworn in, Prime Minister Narendra Modi released a book that had been edited, besides Ashley J. Tellis and Reece Trevor, by Debroy. There was less surprise