Interrogating Social Development: Global Perspectives and Local Initiatives

This collection of essays shows that as the developmental processes have not positively impacted all sections of the society, due to inherited sociocultural considerations on the one hand and the state failure to ensure equity to all its citizen on the other, preexisting social imbalances have been reproduced and furthered keeping vast sections of the population persistently poor, illiterate, in ill-health, un/underemployed, homeless, voiceless, and vulnerable. Beside elaborating the dominant perspectives of social development, it also elucidates several developmental initiatives undertaken among the tribes, dalits, forest dwellers, women, physically challenged, sex-workers in various parts of the country and recorded emerging praxes of social development that have emerged from the grass-roots experiences of cooperative activisms. Self-Help Group initiatives, corporate social partnerships, interactivity of marginalized communities, and ICTs interventions.

Debal K. SinghaRoy is a professor of sociology in the department of sociology at Indira Gandhi National Open University. He is a recipient of the Australian Government Endeavour Fellowship, 2010.