About the Book
Since its inception, the Indian model of development has the twin objectives of economic development and social justice woven together. This has shaped both policy and popular aspiration in post-Independence India. In this context, Democratizing Development: Struggles for Rights and Social Justice in India explores and analyses how development gets vitiated by multiple powers and subverts the democratic ideals of participation, equality, inclusion, redistribution and equity, and how the poor and socially marginalised struggle to make development democratic. Examining development through the lens of the most marginalised, the book shows the democratic potential of development as well as the result of its absence. The book contains empirically drawn cases and supplements these with theoretical and analytical arguments. It contributes to contemporary debates in social science such as democracy, social justice, civil society, social mobilisation, social inclusion, redistribution and participatory governance.
About the Panellist
T K Oommen is at present Professor Emeritus at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, from where he retired in 2002 after being a professor for 26 years. He was President of International Sociological Association as well as that of Indian Sociological Society. Prof Oommen was a Visiting Professor/Research Fellow at several universities including University of California, Australian National University, Institute of Advanced Studies, Budapest and Uppsala. He has authored twenty books and edited ten books, and has received many awards for his contribution to sociology. Prof Oommen was conferred the Padma Bhushan in 2008 in recognition of his contribution to higher education.
Shylashri Shankar is a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. She is the author of Scaling Justice: India’s Supreme Court, Anti-Terror Laws and Social Rights and co-author (with Raghav Gaiha) of Battling Corruption: Has NREGA Reached India’s Rural Poor. She has held academic positions at the University of Texas at Austin and the Center on Religion and Democracy at the University of Virginia. In June 2011, she was a Bellagio Fellow at the Rockefeller Centre in Bellagio, Italy. She is currently working on an urban ethnography of a sixteenth-century neighbourhood in Hyderabad.
Rajesh Tandon is Founder-President of Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA). A pioneer of participatory research, Dr Tandon is Co-Chair of UNESCO Chair on Community Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education since 2012. He has championed the cause of building civil society organisations and capacities of the marginalised through promotion of grassroots knowledge, learning and empowerment, and has contributed to the emergence of several local, national and international groups and initiatives to promote participatory development. Dr Tandon has authored more than 100 articles, several books and numerous training manuals. He was honoured with the prestigious Nehru Literacy Award for 2015 by the Indian Adult Education Association.
About the Author
Ranjita Mohanty is a social scientist based in Delhi. She has been working for past 20 years with a cross-section of institutions that include research organisations, grassroots groups, universities, bilateral and multilateral organisations, thus combining research with policy and practice. Her research covers a wide range – development, social policy, participation, social exclusion and inclusion, civil society, citizen action, and rights and entitlements.
Ranjita mohanty has a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has held several position including Fulbright Senior Research Fellow, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA and Visiting Fellow, University of Western Cape, Bellville, Cape Town, South Africa. She has co-edited two books, Does Civil Society Matter? Governance in Contemporary India and Participatory Citizenship: Issues of Identity, Exclusion, Inclusion.
The book is published by Sage Publications, New Delhi.
Tea will be served from 5:00 to 5:30 p.m.
Please RSVP at pooja@cprindia.org
