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ANNUAL REPORT 2013-2014 CENTRE FOR STUDIES IN SOCIAL SCIENCES, CALCUTTA R-1 Baishnabghata-Patuli Township, Kolkata 700 094 Centre For Studies In Social Sciences, Calcutta Annual Report 2013-2014 CONTENTS Pages 1. Director's Note 5 2. List of Members of the Board of Governors / 11 List of Faculty Members / List of Administrative Staff 3. Research Projects – Completed 17 4. Research Projects – On-going 19 5. Academic Activities of Faculty Members 21 6. Teaching Programmes 69 7. Students' Enrollment Lists 72 8. Academic Events 83 9. Archive and Library 109 10. Centre for Training and Research in Public 112 Finance and Policy (CTRPFP) 11. Jadunath Bhavan Museum & Resource Centre 120 (JBM&RC) 12. Affiliation to Scholars from other Academic Institutions 123 and Institutional Collaboration 13. Statement of Accounts 125 5 Director's Note The Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), is nationally and internationally recognised as a premier research institution under the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR). Established on February 1, 1973, the CSSSC has over the past four decades steadily developed its profile as a key centre in the promotion and advancement of research and teaching in the humanities and different social sciences disciplines. The CSSSC can today take pride in both the individual scholarly reputations of its past and present faculty as well as its many collective academic initiatives – in running conferences, workshops and training programmes; in supervising high-quality research; in building unusual archives for historical and cultural research; in hosting a lively seminar series by its own faculty and by visiting scholars; in conducting social and economic surveys; and in guiding public policy projects. The most welcome development of the year has been the presence of several new members of senior and younger faculty, following the faculty recruitments that were conducted during December 2012 – January 2013 to fill the vacant sanctioned academic posts of the institution. It has been a pleasure to have the institution's nearly full faculty strength in place, after many years. The institution extends a warm welcome to the members of faculty who joined over this past academic year and have begun to actively participate in the Centre's many academic activities – Dr Rajarshi Ghose and Dr. Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay (Assistant Professors in History), Dr. Rittwik Chatterjee (Assistant Professor in Economics), Dr. Kiran Keshavamurthy and Dr. Trina Nileena Banerjee (Assistant Professors in Cultural Studies), Dr. Sudipto Chatterjee (Professor, Cultural Studies) and Dr. Rimli Bhattacharyya (Professor in Gender Studies). Their joining the Centre has greatly enhanced the different research and teaching activities of the institutions, and opened up new areas of collaborative and interactive academic engagements. Unfortunately, three new faculty who joined over the year – Dr. Soumyabrata Choudhury (Associate Professor in Cultural Studies), Dr. V. Rajesh (Assistant Professor in History) and Dr. Rahul Mukhopadhyay (Assistant Professor in Sociology) – left within a few months, in the case of the first two persons, to take up permanent job offers in other universities. This has underlined the current imperative of reconsidering the Centre's policy of first offering temporary tenures to new 6 faculty before considering them for permanent tenures against fresh advertisements. To hold on to promising scholars and compete with universities, we may well have to offer permanent positions in the first round itself. We are grateful to the funding from the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India through the ICSSR that has made it possible for the CSSSC to regain its full faculty strength, and hope. And we look forward to the renewal of the full matching grant from the Department of Higher Education, Government of West Bengal, to help us maintain our full strength of academic and administrative staff. The CSSSC's M.Phil. programme in the Social Sciences, and Ph.D. programme, both of which have been affiliated to Jadavpur University since 2009, has been growing from strength to strength. The number of applications and intake of M.Phil. and Ph.D. students from all over the country reflects the national importance and reputation of the CSSSC's M.Phil. and Ph.D. programmes. The CSSSC has always maintained high standards of teaching alongside its mandate of cutting-edge and advanced inter-disciplinary research. The CSSSC's academic profile has also been built up through a variety of projects it has conducted, some funded by external agencies and others that are self-funded or developed in collaboration with research networks. The Centre for Research in Public Finance and Policy (CTRPFP) that was set up within the CSSSC with a generous endowment of the Ministry of Finance during 2011-2012, continued its seminars and workshops, and recruited an Assistant Professor and a Post-doctoral Fellow in Economics to add to the faculty strength of the institution. An earlier endowment of the Reserve Bank of India also continues to greatly benefit the institution, by supporting a Chair and research positions in Economics. Given the multi- disciplinary strength of the institution, it today attracts a variety of projects and research collaborations, involving individual and joint faculty participation. Broadly speaking, over the last few years, the following areas have emerged as major focal areas of specialised project-funded activities – Social Science Research Methods, Social Inequities and Exclusion, Democracy and Governance, Archival Documentation and Dissemination. Many of these projects have augmented the vital role of the CSSSC as a critical interface between academic research and public policy. Some of the externally-funded research projects of the CSSSC have 7 also allowed the institution to take on groups of younger post-doctoral scholars, who contribute richly to its academic calendar of teaching, workshops and seminars. The discontinuation of the funding under the special Research Promotion Scheme that the ICSSR introduced in 2012 for all its research institutes has greatly hampered many of the planned activities of the CSSSC – like the appointment of Research Associates and Postdoctoral Fellows, the invitation of short-term Visiting Professors, the building of library and archival resources, and the hosting of national-level seminars and workshops. For instance, one of the Centre's flagship annual workshops that it has been conducting since 1995 – the Cultural Studies Workshop for young researchers – has been greatly jeopardised due to the lack of assured annual funding for the event. Despite this constraint, the CSSSC kept going its annual one-day workshop in memory of our colleague, Dr. Anjan Ghosh. The theme of the Anjan Ghosh Memorial Workshop held on 30th September 2013 was “Calcutta/Kolkata: The City in Our Times” and it brought together an interactive gathering of historians and sociologists working on the city with three documentary film-makers and their perspectives on the contemporary city. The 18th edition of the highly- successful series of the Cultural Studies Workshop was convened in Santiniketan from 9th – 14th March 2014 on the theme, “Law, Culture and Social Justice”. The new funding released by the ICSSR for Orientation workshops for SC/ST and other Marginal Communities gave us the opportunity to initiate a series of new kinds of workshops focussing on the theme of caste and its inequities. The five-day Cultural Studies Workshop held at Santiniketan was one of these and was specially designed to meet the new targets of social inclusion. Under this rubric, three other innovative national level workshops were organised over the year at CSSSC – (i) Workshop on “Discrimination, Citizenship and Equality: Interrogations and Contestations” from 18th – 22nd November 2013 (ii) Workshop on “Interrogating Caste: Culture and Politics at the Margins” on 26th and 27th March 2014, which included testimonies, songs and performances from Dalit communities from two regions of West Bengal, Sunderbans and Malda (iii) Seminar on “Caste and Inequality: Social, Political and Economic Reflections” on 28th and 29th March 2014. The details on the programmes and participants of these workshops are given in the main report. 8 Two sets of lectures were given during 2013-2014 under the CSSSC's special named annual lecture series, the Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar Lectures in Indian History and Culture. The first set of illustrated lectures was delivered by the eminent contemporary artist, Vivan Sundaram, on the theme, “Where the Railroad Meets the Sea: Fifty Years of Life and Work”, over 16th and 17th April 2014, the first lecture titled “The Pictorial Image” and the second, “Installation Art and the Mediatic Turn”. The event brought together an important gathering of intellectuals and artists in the city. The next set of lectures were delivered on 26th and 27th February 2014, by the well- known scholar on nineteenth century Calcutta, Sumanta Banerjee, out of his new work on the biography of Calcutta's roads. The two lectures were titled, “Political Economy of Road Construction in Colonial Calcutta” and “A Tale of Four Towns: White, Black, South and New”. Among the main institutional assets of the CSSSC are its Library and Archives. The Library has one of the best book and journal collections in the field of the contemporary humanities and social sciences, and a large body of official surveys, reports and quantitative