- Lived:
- born 22 January 1959, Leuven, Belgium → India from 1979; Delhi, Allahabad, and for the past decade Ranchi, Jharkhand; an Indian citizen since 2002
- Field:
- development economics — hunger, education, employment; the rights-based school of Indian social policy
- The Big Idea:
- Turn welfare from a favour into a right. He helped draft the law that gives every rural Indian household a legal claim to a hundred days of paid work — and wrote it in the field, with the people who would use it.
- In their words:
- "jholawala economics" — the sneer of Delhi's commentators for cloth-bag activists, which he took for the subtitle of his own book (as of September 2026)
- If you remember one thing:
- A Belgian professor's son gave up his passport, his salary and his car, took Indian citizenship, and spent forty years cycling between villages and Parliament to make the Indian state keep its promises to its poorest citizens — and the largest employment guarantee in human history is written in his hand.