Articles by Jean Dreze

In 1997, while adopting the “Restatement of Judicial Values” (also called the Code of Conduct), the judges of the Supreme Court decided that each judge would declare her/his assets in confidence to the Chief Justice of India. This was reiterated in 1999 in a conference of Chief Justices.

The following is an open letter to prime minister Manmohan Singh: We are writing to express our deep concern about the neglect of children under six in the Union Budget 2007-08.

A recent survey in two districts of Jharkhand found many serious flaws in the implementation of the new National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. Some of them could be explained as teething problems. As the experience of Rajasthan shows, there is scope for better implementation. All said and done, NREGA has created a sense of hope amongst the rural poor. This sense of hope can be further strengthened if people understand that the act gives them employment as a matter of right, and that claiming this right is within the realm of possibility.

It is widely accepted that the right to food forms one of the basic economic and social rights essential to achieve 'economic democracy' in India. This right is nowhere near realisation in India, where undernutrition levels are among the lowest in the world. The right to food moreover, does not easily translate into well-defined entitlements and responsibilities. Though serious difficulties are involved in making the right to food fully justiciable, new interventions are possible in at least three ways - through legal action, through democratic practice and through changing public perceptions. More importantly, the right to food needs to be linked to other economic and social rights relating to education, work, health and information, which together hold the promise of radical change in public priorities and democratic politics.

This paper presents a new set of integrated poverty and inequality estimates for India and Indian states for 1987-88, 1993-94 and 1999-2000. The poverty estimates are broadly consistent with independent evidence on per capita expenditure, state domestic product and real agricultural wages. They show that poverty decline in the 1990s proceeded more or less in line with earlier trends. Regional disparities increased in the 1990s, with the southern and western regions doing much better than the northern and eastern regions. Economic inequality also increased within states, especially within urban areas, and between urban and rural areas. We briefly examine other development indicators, relating for instance to health and education. Most indicators have continued to improve in the nineties, but social progress has followed very diverse patterns, ranging from accelerated progress in some fields to slow down and even regression in others. We find no support for sweeping claims that the nineties have been a period of 'unprecedented improvement' or 'widespread impoverishment'.