India's Ink

One of the unmitigated joys of summer is the ability to dip into books, read a page or two. Or three. And so on... And the perfect books to do it with are anthologies. There are many that have been coming out over the past few years, but of note is the series from Penguin, India, First Proof: The Penguin Books of New Writing from India.

The last book, No. 3 in the series - and already old by now- has contributions in poetry, nonfiction, fiction, extracts from graphic novels, poetry and an extract from a graphic novel " from unpublished or relatively new authors as well as established names in genres that are new to them. Some of the contributors to this volume are Sankar Sridhar, Neel Kamal Puri, Kishore Valicha, Nirupama Dutt, Ashok Malik, Jahnavi Barua, Shakti Bhatt, Parismita Singh and Temsula Ao."

Also from Penguin, but with quite a different level of surrounding hype is the forthcoming Amitav Ghosh novel, The Sea of Poppies. Penguin is breathless: "The first in Amitav Ghosh’s new trilogy of novels, Sea of Poppies is a stunningly vibrant and intensely human work that confirms his reputation as a master storyteller. At the heart of this epic saga, set in the 1830s, is a vast ship, the Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean to the Mauritius Islands. As to the people on board, they are a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval in the mid nineteenth century, fate has thrown together a truly diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed village-woman, from a mulatto American freedman to a free-spirited European orphan. As they sail down the Hooghly and into the sea, their old family ties are washed away, and they view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers, who will build whole new lives for themselves in the remote islands where they are being taken. It is the beginning of an unlikely dynasty.

The sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields by the Ganga, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of China at the time of the Opium Wars. But it is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, which makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly alive—a masterpiece from one of the world's finest novelists. "

Well... something must grow in Brooklyn. Jhumpa Lahiri is a resident too, one hears. SofP will soon be out from Viking, Rs 599 when available. A nanoextract was given away free with Outlook Magazine this week.

Journals of the JNU

The Jawaharlal Nehru University occupies a special place in the space of Indian academics. Since it was founded in the late 1960's- a time when there was much ferment in universities across the world- the very special character of JNU shows in the way it which it has integrated a social awareness and responsibility with academics... The faculty at JNU bring out a number of academic journals in a range of disciplines, and this post is about some of them.

• JSL, The Journal of the School of Language, Literature Culture Studies, is edited by Professor G J V Prasad. JSL is "proud to provide a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary forum for discussion of all issues related to language, literature, and other aspects of culture." It is published twice a year, each issue typically being on a specific theme. For example, Autumn 2007 is on Pedagogy, with contributions from Anjali Gera Roy, Vaishna Narang, Kirti Kapur, Seema Murugan, Madhu Sahni, B. Mangalam, Chitra Harshawardhan, Rasheed Abiodun Musa, Radhika Coomaraswamy and Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham, Fatima Rizvi, Chaity Das.

• The Quarterly Journal of International Studies is published by the School of International Studies. Founded in July 1959, this journal has acquired an international standing as the leading Indian academic journal in the field. It publishes original research articles on issues and problems, including problems of theory of contemporary relevance in the broad field of international relations and area studies. A referred journal, it attracts contributions not only from the members of the School faculty and other Indian universities/ research institutions but also from scholars all over the world.
  

• There was MATRIX, a short lived E-Journal of International Relations, published by scholars of the School of International Studies.

• And there is KRITIK, an occasional publication of the Center for Russian Studies of the School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies.

JNU faculty edit a number of other journals as well- or serve as members of the editorial boards. These are too numerous to mention in totality, but two we would like to draw your attention to are JHD, the Journal of Health and Development, and Social Scientist.

• JHD is a Journal of the Society for Applied Socioeconomic Research and Development and is edited by Prof. K R Nayar of the Center for Community Health and Social Medicine of the School of Social Sciences. Describing the journal, they say "The development discourse of this millennium has moved forward, with the neo-liberal agenda tightening its hold with a deliberate tinge of those issues like health which are apparently human faced! It is in this light that some concerned scholars got together to launch this journal, which will primarily address the emerging scenario in public health, development and the sufferings of the marginalised sections in the world. The journal aims to highlight and encourage socially relevant theoretical and empirical work in the fields of health and related disciplines of development. It holds the viewpoint that the linkages between health and development need to be understood within the context of social, political and economic factors. The journal seeks to highlight these linkages by providing a forum for discussions and debates as well as a medium for dissemination of research in these areas." The Journal is a quarterly.
  

• Professor Prabhat Patnaik of the Center for Economic Studies and Planning edits Social Scientist. "Charting change from the cutting edge of knowledge, pushing the frontiers of reserach to an ever-widening horizon, the Social Scientist has built a reputation of being an outstanding journal in the social sciences and humanities. For three decades now it has analysed trends, recorded changes, even roadmapped the future. Its writers, veteran and newcomer, tackle the subjects with a breadth and depth that makes the Social Scientist indispensable to teachers and students, laymen and specialists. Recognized experts and brilliant young minds write on economic policy, social change, institutions and organizations, issues in history, methodology and theory. Their work goes into making the journal a collector's item: its back issues, available online at the Digital South Asia Library, are a must for any reference library. Social Scientist had made its mark not only in terms of content, but also in the quality of production: its design is elegant and user-friendly. Here is an important forum for the exchange of latest ideas that informs and enriches in equal measure."

Subscribe to JSL, JHD and Social Scientist via Scholars.

The play was the thing...

Vijay Tendulkar, who passed away recently was richly and deservedly celebrated. The plays that he wrote in the 1960's and 70's were classics that changed Indian theater in fundamental ways. Shantata!, Sakharam Binder, and (for me) above all, Ghasiram Kotwal- tremendous plays, great theater, and a powerful social commentary...

His Wiki entry says "By providing insight into major social events and political upheavals during his adult life, Tendulkar became one of the strongest radical political voices in Maharashtra in recent times. While contemporary writers were cautiously exploring the limits of social realism, he jumped into the cauldron of political radicalism, and courageously exposed political hegemony of the powerful and the hypocrisies in the Indian social mindset. His powerful expression of human angst has resulted in his simultaneously receiving both wide public acclaim, and high censure from the orthodox and the political bigwigs. "

Scholars lists a few of the anthologies of plays of Vijay Tendulkar. Kamala. The Vultures. Silence the court is in Session. Ghasiram Kotwal. And some others. These have been published by OUP and are listed on our Performing Arts and Drama page.

Renaissance man

My Country! In the days of Glory Past
A beauteous halo circled round thy brow
And worshipped as deity thou wast,
Where is that Glory, where is that reverence now?

Lines that could be written today, this verse is from "To my Native Land" by Henry Derozio (1809-31), the first "Indian" poet. Highly influential in his tragically short life, Derozio taught at Hindu College, Kolkata. In life that seems to have been lived in a fast-forward mode, Derozio managed by the age of 14 to quit formal school, start writing poetry, and at the age of 18 to apply for and get a teaching position, and by the age of 21 to rouse enough passion in his colleagues that he was expelled from the faculty, having started many future Brahmo-Samaj members on their free-thinking course... And by the age of 22 he was dead of cholera.

Oxford University Press publish Rosinka Chaudhuri's Derozio, Poet of India. The Definitive Edition, that deals with on the life and poetry of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio. The book "brings together all of Derozio’s poems, along with their notes, as well as all available prose, correspondence, and journalism. This definitive edition comprises not just the two volumes of poetry that appeared when Derozio was alive— Poems and The Fakeer of Jungheera—but a substantial number of new poems, essays, reflections, letters, notices, reviews, and responses to Derozio’s poems published in newspapers and periodicals during his lifetime as well as posthumously.

This wealth of original material is supported by an important introduction by Rosinka Chaudhuri that places Derozio at the conceptual beginnings of a nation that had begun to be conjured into existence through metaphor and image, rhetoric and philosophy, poetic practice and political activism. The result is a ground-breaking study of a young man at a historical juncture of great inspiration and promise, who not only propelled a section of the Bengali elite into revolutionary reformism, as is well known, but who also embodied, in his writing and philosophy, the birth of the Indian modern."

In our History and Literature sections, Rs 795. Hardcover, 752 pages, ISBN: 9780195669091

This Borders thing....

No, this not about the bookstore chain.

In the last few weeks there have been a few news articles about Scholars, and our Borders Initiative. And about our Cull-Fest. This post is just to give links to the newspaper articles that many of you have written in to ask about (Thanks!).

The Hindustan Times had an item about our cull-fest. Basically, our idea here was to help people give away books that they no longer had use for. There is always that chance that the books you want to give away will eventually be sold for unimaginably high prices on AntiquarianBooks.com, but sometimes one has to take a risk. We had great fun giving stuff away, the people who got the books seemed to value them, and we even sent books out of town to people in far off lands...

Our Borders Initiative got exposure via IANS in a number of places, including the Thai-Indian News website.

And there was a recent article in the Indian Express...

Some of you will notice that on our website, our name appears as

Scholars without Borders^SM

^{The superscript denotes "Service Mark". Sort of like a TradeMark, only more accurately depicting what we do.}

Other voices, other tongues

Zubaan, many of you will know, is the brainchild of Urvashi Butalia who had earlier founded Kali for Women, the first feminist press in India and one of the few in the world...

Small, select, and fiercely independent, Kali for Women and her two daughters, Zubaan and Women Unlimited bring out a diverse and important set of books on gender and related issues. One such title, just picked at random from Zubaan's impressive list is Atreyee Sen's Shiv Sena Women.

"This fascinating book, based on Atreyee Sen’s immersion in the low-income, working-class slums of Bombay, tells the story of the women and children of the Hindu right wing party, the Shiv Sena, in Western India. The women’s front of the Sena, known as the ‘Mahila Aghadui’, has been instrumental in creating and sustaining communal violence, and the infamous Hindu-Muslim riots of 1992-3 brought them into the limelight.

Sen charts the Aghadi’s transformation from a support group into a militant and partially autonomous women’s task force. She turns feminist scholarship on its head by documenting a situation where women have become the primary retainers and perpetrators of a violent nationalistic discourse, acquiring social and economic status either by default or as reward."

In our Gender Studies section. Rs 395. ISBN: 978818988482.

A Flock of Seagulls

One of the finest publishing houses in India is Seagull, Kolkata. Their books- both the content as well as the production value- are in quality nonpareil. Finding them easily is quite another issue, so Scholars is pleased to offer a small number of their titles via this post.

We have limited numbers of these, so please write in to find out if we have the one you want- and since we do like to see our shelves getting empty, we'll be happy to send them to you anywhere in India, free of shipping charges. And give them to you at 5% off. No kidding, 5% off the list price of what is available....

(Whats with the free deals, you say? We're feeling expansive, and since we were offering free shipping on IPDA titles, and on all books to the border states, we thought why not for this too.... And 5% off the list price is just because.)

Our website carries a lot of Seagull titles, of course. Some of the ones listed below are already on the site, but most are not, a consequence of the fact that some of these books are out of print. Like we said, there are limited number of copies, so please write in to check.

1. Begum Barve, Satish Alekar, Rs
   
2. Birsa Munda, K S Singh, Rs 625
3. Bitter Soil, Mahashweta Devi, Rs 175
   
4. Body Blows, M. Padmanabhan, D. Mehta, P. Sengupta, Rs 250
5. Breast Stories, Mahashweta Devi, Rs 275
   
6. Captured Moments, Shambu Shaha, Rs 400
   
7. Catching Fish, Meera Mukherjee, Rs 95
   
8. Chanakya Vishnugupta, G P Deshpande, Rs 150
9. Dramatic Moments, Nemai Ghosh, Rs 900
   
10. Dust on the Road, Mahashweta Devi, Rs 275
    
11. Ghasiram Kotwal, Vijay Tendulkar, Rs 95
12. In the land of Enki, Vilas Sarang, Rs 75
    
13. Jewish Portrait, Indian Frames, Jael Silliman, Rs 495.00
14. Jokumaraswami, Kambar, Rs 150
    
15. Madhavi, Bhisham Sahni, Rs 150
    
16. Mahacharitra the great spring, and other plays, H S Shivaprakash, Rs 225
    
17. Mareech the legend and Jagannath, Arun Mukherjee, Rs 150
    
18. Over, Under, and Around, Richard Schechner, Rs 450
    
19. Political Plays, G P Deshpande, Rs 175
20. Post War Revolt of the Rural poor in Bengal, A Lahiri, Rs 475.
21. The Armenian Champa Tree, Mahashweta Devi, Rs 90
    
22. The Dread departure, Satish Alekar, Rs 150
    
23. The Hour of Goddess, Chitrita Bannerji, Rs 475
    
24. The Theatre of Kanhailal : Pebet and Memoirs of Africa, Rustom Bharucha, Rs 350.
25. Times Harvest, Amaresh Dutta and Jogen Chowdhury, Rs 450
    

Write in to us at scholarswithoutborders@gmail.com.

Epilogue J & K

SwB rarely advertises, but that could change, given that we want to increase our outreach to the borders.... And to start, we decided to have a small insert is in the curiously named magazine, Epilogue J & K in both its print and web forms. A monthly magazine which has the byline "because there is more to know" and which we heartily endorse.

Epilogue is an independent online news resource that serves as an authentic, accurate and rapid source of information on Jammu and Kashmir. They aggregate news from "all nooks and corners of the state and disseminate the same with a professional construction". "Freethinking professionals constitute the core team at Epilogue", with an "intellectual duty to uphold liberal, rational thought at every level of the organisation, at the same time maintaining the richness of diversity of ideas characteristic to our society". We are grateful to Epilogue for their help in our outreach activities, and for being there to present a point of view that needs to be seen and heard. This is one part of our country that many of us forget is a part of our country except in the crassest territorial sense...

Single issues of the magazine come at Rs 40. So a years subscription should be Rs 480, right?

Wrong!

Annual subscriptions are Rs 450, and to make it really sweet, you get a complete subscription to Tehelka, 51 issues, totally free! Amazing? Write in to us.

New Beginnings

Several beginnings this month.... Our outreach to the borders of the country has received fresh impetus with the award of a small grant which will enable us to travel to the North Eastern states of India, and to Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir, to spread the word about Scholars. The message is simple: There is a wealth of academic material that can be accessed, and we are here to simplify the process...

There is another message too, that there is a wealth of academic material being created in these regions- several small and excellent publishing houses that bring out books of interest. On Tea. Or Buddhism... Tribal studies... Glaciology... Natural resources... Wildlife... Politics... Anthropology... We'll keep alerting you to the new material as it makes its way onto our booklists as we did for the Vendrame Institute a few months ago.

So both for outreach, as well as for representation, our initiatives into these borders is very very important to us... There have been a number of articles- in the Hindustan Times, and via the IANS to a number of e-links, and numerous posts, blogs, and so on. We would be grateful for any help in this matter- so please do tell your friends about this.

And to make it sweeter, in the coming four months, we will mail any academic book to the states of our outreach (J&K, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Tripura, Mizoram) totally FREE of cost.

But we have other new beginnings too. Our Poetry section, for instance. There is so much excellent poetry written in English- apart from A K Ramanujam, Nissim Ezekiel, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Jayanta Mahapatra, there are a host of poets both established and new. And we're happy to create a space for them.

Indian Writing in English. We started the section, but this has not developed into much, partly because of the wealth of possibilities. Like Balaam's ass, but with too many haystacks, we find ourselved (temporarily) unable to move. Help us please- send in suggestions!

And for those of you in Delhi, we have a new place to operate out of, in Katwaria Sarai. Pictures of the room, and of the SwB Team, in a future post. Our phone number is the same, 99717 63322.

A Y U S H

Its one of those acronyms that seems just right, the Department of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy.... Putting all the alternative medical strategies together, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has created a Department of AYUSH located in Ghaziabad, and they are responsible for standards as well as the laws that govern the sale, advertisement and testing of the medications.

They also have a wide range of publications. Having just seen the review of The Ayurvedic Pharmacopoeia of India: Part II. (Formulations) in Current Science (Bangalore), we thought that this should be covered here, particularly since there seemed to be Part I as well, and probably similar Pharmacopoeias for the other alternate medicine traditions... This led us to the remarkable website of the Hungarian Ayurveda Medical Foundation where one can download the entire Part I of the Pharmacopoeia (over 3000 digitized pages!) along with a wealth of information relating to Ayurveda. Much of which, we are sad to note, cannot be as easily accessed from sites within India... Magyar Ayurveda Gyógyászati Alapítvány rocks!

Alternate medicinal formulations are dismissed in some circles as being unscientific (which they often are) while they are as enthusiastically embraced in others... The need for reproducible standards is widely recognised, in particular by the medical community. This book therefore is an important move by the Ministry of Health. As D B Anantha Narayana says in his review of the book, "given the challenges of analytical science and the need for such quality specifications, the publication of this API is a step in the right direction, and is commendable. Though this book is primarily of regulatory nature, it also provides a lot of information."

In the Current Science Review List, Rs 500.

International Anthem

Anthem Press, the independent publishing house that specializes in the social sciences (particularly in history, politics, literature, and economics), and which is headquartered in London has an office in Delhi and Kolkata. They bring out a number of academic titles in Indian editions and two that caught our eye recently (although these are not particularly new books) are A History of Modern India, 1480-1950 edited by Claude Markovits and Rethinking Development Economics, edited by Ha-Joon Chang.

Described in a review as "a darkly original text", A History of Modern India offers an analysis of the "major empires of modern India, from the Mughals to the Raj, A History of Modern India considers the economic, social and intellectual dynamism that accompanied intervening periods of political fragmentation, such as the 80 years that separated the Mughal and the British regimes. Finally, the book explores the difficulties confronting the rise of Indian nationalism and the consequent confrontation between religious communities: what should have been the crowning victory of a pacifist anticolonial movement was instead resolved tragically with the violence of Partition in 1947."

In our History Section. Rs 495. ISBN 9781843310044

Ha-Joon Chang's Rethinking Development Economics offers a heterodox perspective and looks at "the failure of neoliberal reform to generate long-term growth and reduce poverty in many developing and transition economies. .... Over the last few decades, the older generation of development economists has been edged out of most major universities, particularly in the USA. The situation in most developing countries is even worse: although there is more demand for alternatives to orthodox development economics, these countries have even less capability to generate such alternatives. Rethinking Development Economics... addresses key issues in development economics, ranging from macroeconomics, finance and governance to trade, industry, agriculture and poverty. Bringing together some of the foremost names in the field, this comprehensive and timely collection constitutes a critical staging post in the future of development economics. "

In our Economics Section. Rs 595. ISBN 9781843311102

Despair is not an option....

This post, the title of which is taken from, among other places, the writings of William Coffin, is a follow up of two commentaries that have appeared in the last weeks on the state of disrepair of Indian Science.

There is much to agree with what is written in both the essays that Rahul Basu of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, in his blog As I Please links with in the post titled T(h)rashing Indian Science: Anita Mehta (of the SN Bose Center, Kolkata) writes in the Times of India, and Gautam Desiraju (of the University of Hyderabad) in Nature India.

This is not a rebuttal to any of the points made in these essays, though one can always pick a bone here or there. I think the problem is serious enough to warrant the attention- and the action- of any and all the people who are involved in science and science administration in the country. One of the distressing things about our problems is that these are, regrettably, self-evident. The solutions are not.

This is also not a Pollyanna-ish or a Mr Micawber-ish affirmation that something will turn up. Yet, I think that the proper reaction to the two essays that offer different degrees of insight into the problems that ail higher education- particularly that in science- in India is just this: Despair is not an option.

The opposite of despair is not---I see it---great hope, but guarded optimism. And I choose to draw my optimism from various sources. Let me, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning said for entirely different reasons, count the ways.

The base is, slowly but surely, increasing. Compared to even a decade ago, the background of people who come into higher education is much more diverse. I am not a demographer, but surely anyone who has seen Delhi University (or JNU, or Jamia) will be struck by the number of students from the more remote parts of India. Of course there is not much migration into Nagaland or Assam University, but I am hopeful that given interesting academic choices, this too will happen.

The net is making a difference. As more and more institutions in India put up more information about themselves and what they have to offer on the net, the increased availability and access to information has helped. Of course at Scholars we are partial to the net since this is our only way, but seeing the number of people who come to our site, and to see what they want has been seriously educational. There is material of great quality out there- produced by a largely unsung tribe of people- and the good news is that many many people want it. They want all that we can provide, and then some!

Science funding is increasing. In living memory, the average grant size has gone up. To be sure there are some under-deserving underperformers who get funded anyhow. But here, I stay with chaos theory and with Darwin. Was our ancestral Eve the most "deserving" of the hominids that graced the savannah? And yet, without her.... Eventual success is often unrelated to initial conditions. So let us keep funding some seemingly unworthy projects: some will bear unexpected fruit.


There is a limit to how much sycophancy we can tolerate. Be it politics, or be it science politics. Those who have risen to the top by this route are seriously compromised and they know it. And in the best traditions of game theory, they know that we know it. And that we know that they know that we know it, and so on. There simply isn't that degree of power in the upper positions anymore: the directors of any institution in the limelight knows that he or she is going to fail by very visible- and very international- yardsticks if his (or her) faculty do not perform. If the state of science reflects the state of the nation, then there is good news indeed. We are becoming less tolerant of dynastic politics, and this will translate into our demand for competent science managers.

IT doesn't get everyone's bells ringing. There is a burnout in the IT business, in part fuelled by the leaders of the industry who neither care about higher education, or even about lower education. Wanting bodies for a body shop is all very well, but I have heard it often enough from the very top echelons of the IT industry that they really don't give a damn to what their employees have learned elsewhere: they teach them what is necessary in situ. So if the education in the IITs or NITs or wherever is deemed inferior to that given by the NIITs, then the IT industry will have only itself to blame for the quality of the people it is able to eventually attract.

There is a brave new world out there... of scholarship, and of intellectual adventure. It may not be all there in the sciences, but our experience at Scholars has been an amazingly rewarding one- as we have learned slowly but surely, that there are truly many ways to intellectual leadership. All the cliche's are true in the end: with a billion people, even the tail of any distribution carries a lot of weight. Sheer intelligence, creativity, originality. Its all there, and there is no way out but patience. And repeated investment. This is the law of large numbers.

But this is not a plea for complacency either. There are real problems out there as both Anita Mehta and Gautam Desiraju have pointed out. The lack of quantity is distressing and to my mind, a bit more so than the lack of quality. (Both the writers are very well known for their scientific contributions. Anita Mehta for being among the first people to work on sand and granular materials and Gautam for having made fundamental and ground-breaking contributions to crystal engineering.)

Gautam Desiraju makes a very important point: For a country of our size, there simply isn't enough output. This is both at the collective level and at the individual level. The output from many scientists at Universities and colleges is low because their funding is low. But what is the excuse that our scientists at prestigious research institutes have? As Anita Mehta points out, they have enhanced funding, better toilets (although with the lack of water in most cities in India, I am not sure I want them en suite) and liberal leave policies that allow them to mix and mingle with scientists across the globe. And then to find that they produce one or two or maybe three research papers a year and mentor maybe a student or two every alternate year. Occasionally. Is this truly worth it? As an investment, the returns are way below market average...

In the end, we need more accountability. And this is not impossible to achieve, given the in-your-face nature of information today. Put it all on the web. We have a right to know, and the right to be judged. Funding agencies could- and should- be more open about their grants, who got them, how much, and what they delivered.

We also need more coherent plans than to create new institutes that will train fifty students apiece a year. How many do we need? How much money can be invested in higher education? What reservations are truly needed? How many jobs need to be created? In what areas of enquiry do we need people? Much of higher education is plagued by a poor understanding of what it is that we need and where. The creation of a Knowledge Commission was to have been a step in this direction, but that seems to have been seriously less than effective.

Of course the unexamined academic life is hardly worth living. Yet given that, to come back to the title of this post, despair is not an option. There is enough and more in the country by way of talent, by way of funding, and by way of effort. Like the best of our collective actions- the building of the Delhi Metro, say- I think that in the end, we can be amazed by the art of the possible.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

No, this is not about the children's classic.

Many of you will know of the Panos Institutes. Their agenda- a difficult one at the best of times- is to "work to ensure that information is effectively used to foster public debate, pluralism and democracy". Panos works with media and other information actors to enable developing countries to shape and communicate their own development agendas through informed public debate, focusing on "amplifying the voices of the poor and marginalized". Well worth pursuing...

An issue that is poorly understood by most of us is that of mining. Beyond having a gut feeling that strip mining is "bad" and that most miners work in the most miserable conditions. And that it is environmentally unwise. Beyond that, it is also clear that in India, the resource rich states of Jharkhand and Chattisgarh are, by most other indicators, backward and underdeveloped. Why? What is the system of governance that so blatantly "allows the ruthless exploitation of a defenceless people for the benefit of the privileged"?

Caterpillar and the Mahua flower: Tremors in India’s mining fields, a book that can be downloaded free from the Panos South Asia website "seeks to unravel the labyrinth of mining through its publication. One of the most incongruous faces of India’s modern, globalised economy is to be seen in the country’s mineral-rich states like Orissa and Chhattisgarh. As multinational conglomerates walk away with state blessings to prospect for resources under the earth, the original custodians of the land, the Adivasis find that their homes and livelihoods are being bulldozed to make way for industries. While the lavish lifestyles of the mining moguls are chronicled in minute detail, the struggle of the Adivasis seldom gets the attention it deserves."

This book is a compilation of thirteen essays that seeks to correct this anomaly by examining the manner in which mining has ripped apart the ecological, cultural and social fabric that holds Adivasi communities together. The murky and underhand state-industry nexus that allows mining companies to function despite blatantly violating rules while also recording the popular Adivasi resistance movements that have sprung up in these parts is also covered in the book.

Caterpillar and the Mahua flower endeavours to illuminate the dark corners of India’s mining corridor, and hopes to provoke debate and action. The book, outcome of a project funded by the Swedish International Development Agency, is free for download. Printed copies cost Rs 150. ISBN 978-99933-766-7-5.