SWEDISH SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES NETWORK

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Visit to the Institute of Social Sciences (ISS) in Delhi
November 2, 2007

Web page: http://www.issin.org/

On Friday morning, November 2, we visited the Institute of Social Sciences (ISS) at 8 Nelson Mandela Marg in New Delhi. We were received by Dr. Bidyut Mohanty, Head of the Department of Women’s Studies at ISS, who organised a meeting with the ISS Director, Prof. George Mathew. Ms. Dinoo Anna Mathew, and Dr. B.S. Baviskar also participated in the meeting. We were extremely well received and had the opportunity to present information about SASNET, its aims, and its forthcoming activities.

ISS was established in 1985 and is a lively centre for researchers trying to link their work to activism. It is an independent institution that depends on outside funding, rather than from the government. The main goal of ISS is to carry out activist-oriented research and make the results useful to government bodies, policy makers, and other activists. In short, they want to be lobbyists whose aim is to improve society and empower marginalized groups.

Bidyut Mohanty and George Mathew in a discussion with Anna Lindberg.

The areas of research include such issues as local democracy, decentralization, urban studies, women studies, and globalization. ISS organises many workshops and conferences, the next one to be held in Thiruvananthapuram on December 14 and 15, 2007 – on ”Kerala People’s Plan Revisited”, focusing on the People’s Plan Campaign launched in mid-1990s in Kerala (Anna later participated in this conference).
Graduate and research students, as well as foreign and indigenous researchers, are invited to spend time at ISS. The institute collaborates with several countries. For example, together with scholars from South Africa, US, UK, and Brazil, they are now working on a project on social justice and local governance in a comparative perspective (India, Brazil, and South Africa).

Students from the Masters Programme on South Asian Studies, organised by the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University have spent time at ISS in September 2006 and 2007. Dr. Mohanty and Dr. George described the students as serious and devoted to their work, but observed that they needed more time for their fieldwork and suggested they make the topics of their papers more narrow and specialised. They also felt that ISS was not able to provide all of the specialised help they wished to because of the short time the students spent spend there.

Dr Bidyut Mohanty, an expert on Famine studies has done her PhD from the Delhi School of Economics and has been working in the areas of women and rural development through the local government in India since 1994. She has been organizing Women’s Political Empowerment Day Programme annually involving hundreds of elected women representatives from panchayats. She is the series editor of the Proceedings on Women and Political Empowerment from 1995 onwards. She has given lectures in different universities of USA and Canada, Thailand and China on women in local government, and she also came to Sweden in 2003 to particioate in the conference on ”Women and Politics in Asia”, organised by the School of Social and Health Sciences, Halmstad University.
Dr. Bidyut Mohanty has also other connections to Sweden. She is involved in a research collaboration with Dr. Sidsel Hansson at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University. In August 2006, Dr. Hansson received a SASNET grant to invite Dr. Mohanty for a guest lecture tour in Sweden. At Lund University she lectured about ”One million women grasstroots (village council) leaders: How do they govern the communities?”.