Publications & Resources
Explore key scholarship, reports, resources and work from our community.
Our faculty, students and researchers work together everyday to contribute to a better world by grappling with urgent problems we are facing in India. We conduct rigorous work to produce high quality learning resources and publications to contribute to public discourse and social change. Here, we feature a sample from our work for everyone to access. You can explore featured resources, policies, and the latest publications from the University.
To explore all the work of our University, please visit our publications repository.
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Abstract
If one asks a teacher in preschool learning spaces in India, about the most usual story that is narrated to children, what is the most common answer? Will there be unanimity in the fact that the story of Thirsty Crow works just as well in many Indian languages, as it does in Indian Sign Language? Those who engage with early childhood care and learning would often stress upon the need to have a visually rich environment in these learning spaces, full of picture books and enthusiastic teachers who never give up a chance to bring out yet another story. Bringing Indian Sign Language to early childhood learning spaces, creating an immersive experience for children before they enter school years by making available in these spaces Indian Sign Language resources (and then taking such initiatives to schools, colleges, and community spaces) would allow us to slowly move toward the dream cherished by deaf adults.
Working Paper Series
Towards a New Development Equilibrium among the Forest Dependent Adivasis of Central India — A Case for Agrarian Adaptive Skilling
in Azim Premji University
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Abstract
In a homogenised imagination of human aspirations, development interventions replicate popular models, including intensive farming in Adivasi landscapes. In the process, they try to sedentarise and individualise Adivasi communities living in the forest peripheries. Even as modernisation remains an elusive target in most of the tribal belts, ethnic socio-ecological institutions become redundant, leaving the community deskilled — ecologically, socially, and economically. Adivasi’s concerns about this conventional development process entailing detribalisation are seldom deliberated in literature and among the community.
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Abstract
Institutional births increased in India from 39% to 79% between 2005 and 2015. Drawing from 17 months of fieldwork, this article traces the shift from home to hospital births across three generations in a hamlet in Assam in Northeast India. Here, too, one finds that most births have shifted from home to hospital in less than a decade, aided by multiple factors. These include ‘free’ birthing facilities and financial incentives offered by government schemes, idiosyncratic changes within the hamlet, such as the introduction of biomedical practices through home births where oxytocin was used, and changes in cultural belief systems among local people. The exploration reveals significant transitions between (and fluidities of) categories such as local/global, tradition/modernity, past/present and nature/technology, creating a complex and ambivalent narrative of change, in which the voices of mothers should not be ignored.
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Working Paper Series
Lessons from Dharnai, “India’s First Fully Solar Powered Village”: A Case Study
in Azim Premji University
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Abstract
This case study is of “India’s First Fully Solar Powered Village”2 — Dharnai. It is a case of the promises of and challenges facing the realisation of “energy democracy” — the idea that distributed renewable energy systems have the potential to democratise the economy and society.
Working Paper Series
One Part Farmers: Villages two decades after land acquisition for the Bengaluru International Airport
in Azim Premji University
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Abstract
Constitutional measures to ensure fair compensation and livelihood security to the land losing refugees of development processes, overlook the complexity of ‘public purpose’ — the dominant rationale behind operationalizing ‘eminent domain’ of the state. Popular perception of public purpose as urbanization muffles the de facto social citizenship around plural values of agricultural landscapes. Ignoring the enduring public purposes served by agrarian landscapes aids in underestimating the longterm welfare impacts on displaced farmers.
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Reconceptualising rehabilitation of female survivors of violence: The case of Sampoornata Model of Dance Movement Therapy (DMT) in India
in Women & Therapy
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- Rhea Kaikobad
Abstract
This article discusses an intervention for rehabilitation of female survivors of violence that reconceptualises rehabilitation through a feminist lens: the Sampoornata model of Dance Movement Therapy (DMT), which has been created and is being practiced by an NGO called Kolkata Sanved in Kolkata, India. Feminist rehabilitation is seen as a perspective which, in contrast to dominant rehabilitation praxis, recognises that individual experiences of violence are embedded in patriarchal social structures and aims for survivors to internalise a sense of agency by deconstructing internalised patriarchal norms that legitimise violence against women and girls and stigmatisation of survivors. The article highlights how Sampoornata enacts feminist rehabilitation through the medium of the body. Survivors reclaim the body from patriarchal control and reflect on the embodied experience in order to question patriarchal norms, remove self-blame, and negotiate a space for themselves within society.
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Working Paper Series
Working Paper Series: Urban Wastewater for Agriculture: Farmers’ Perspectives from Peri-urban Bengaluru
in Azim Premji University
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- School of Development
Abstract
Modern India has a history of a vibrant and active social sector. Many local development organisations, community organisations, social movements and non-governmental organisations populate the space of social action. Such organisations imagine a different future and plan and implement social interventions at different scales, many of which have lasting impact on the lives of people and society. However, their efforts and, more importantly, the learning from these initiatives remains largely unknown not only in the public sphere but also in the worlds of ‘development practice’ and ‘development education’. This shortfall impedes the process of learning and growth across interventions, organisations and time.
Survey
Report: Covid-19 crisis: Survey on internal challenges faced by social sector organisations
in Azim Premji University
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Abstract
This report is based on a study to understand how the Social Sector Organisations (SSOs) are adapting their operations and resources to the challenges posed by the pandemic and the kind of changes they anticipate in the social sector in the next few years as they adjust to a post-Covid world. The study specifically focuses on the internal organisational changes of SSOs both in the short-term and medium-term.
The situation assessment study was carried out over five months during January-May 2021. The study was carried in two parts: (a) A survey of SSOs followed by (b) qualitative in-depth interviews with senior management of select organisations.
Of the 107 organisations that responded to the survey, we identified 28 respondents for the qualitative interviews, covering small, medium and large organisations operating in different states and domains such as livelihoods, health, education, human rights and gender.
The findings are organised into the following categories:
a. Humanitarian work carried out by SSOs
b. Impact of the pandemic on the existing programmes of SSOs
c. Impact of the pandemic on the workforce of SSOs
d. Impact on funding to SSOs