Bibek Debroy : An exceptional personality.
1. Passed away on 1 Nov 2024 at the age of 69.
2. Renowned economist and chairman of the Prime Minister’s economic council.
3. Led the Finance ministry's Expert committee for infrastructure Classification and Financing network for Amrit Kala.
4. Made significant contribution to Game theory and economic theory, poverty, law reforms, railway reforms.
5. When 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.
6. He enjoyed working on our ancient texts, making them accessible to the youth.
7. A die-hard believer in ‘free-market economy with well thought-out regulation
8. 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.
9. Apart from translating the unabridged Mahabharata into English in 10 volumes, he translated Ramayana in three volumes, followed by the Harivamsa and the Vedas.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. He was a member of NITI AAYOG since its inception in 2015 till 2019. 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.
13. Awarded Padmashree in 2015.
14. Wrote a book Sarama and her Children.
15. Debroy stepped down as chancellor of the Pune-based Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics on what he had termed “moral grounds”.