LUNCH WITH BS: Jean Dreze

Poster boy with a hunger for field work

Jean Dreze began his adult life as a Belgian mathematical economist with a fine academic record who could have, if he'd chosen to, joined a rich pharma multinational or an international bank or even the Belgian bureaucracy.

Instead today, at the ripe old age of 44, Dreze has chosen to become an Indian citizen who specialises in action-oriented development economics and has collaborated with Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen to understand the structure of poverty and famine in India.

He is an honorary professor at the Delhi School of Economics (D-school) and lives with wife Bela (also a non-conformist) sometimes in Delhi but mostly in such glamorous places as Kalahandi and Moradabad.

He travels by bus or train, but also enjoys racing scooters or his preferred mode of transport, a bicycle, as I found out when I met him for lunch at Sharma Restaurant in Delhi's Kamla Nagar.

It took me a year to set up lunch because Dreze is rarely in town. For what it charges