Program Overview

Media In India: Access, Practices, Concerns and Effects is a collaborative study of Lokniti, a programme of Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS). The report is based on a nationwide survey conducted among over 7,400 citizens earlier this year. The study is comprehensive in nature covering media in all its forms – traditional, new and evolving. It looked at people’s access to different kinds of media, their usage and consumption patterns, and their concerns and attitudes regarding critical issues such as news media coverage, media freedom, media bias, fake news, surveillance, privacy, free expression, censorship, internet shutdowns etc.

Lokniti-CSDS and the India Office of Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, organised an event to release the report and conduct a Panel Discussion, on the 20th October 2022, at The Imperial, Janpath, Connaught Place, Delhi-110001, between 1830- 2030 (IST).

The event witnessed the presence of Professor Awadhendra Sharan, Director, CSDS, Professor Sanjay Kumar, Co-Director, Lokniti-CSDS, Professor Sandeep Shastri, Vice Chancellor, Jagran Lakecity University, Dr. Adrian Haack, Director, the India Office of Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS),  Peter Rimmele, Resident Representative to India, KAS. The event panel had as panelists Nalini Singh, Veteran Journalist; Anurradha Prasad, Chairperson and Managing Director of News24; Abhinandan Sekhri, Founder Newslaundry; Rahul Dev, Senior Jouirnalist, Advisor st SGT University. It witnessed the moderation from Professor Ravi Sundaram, Center for the Study of Developing Societies.

Key Takeaways

• Prof. Awadhendra Sharan remarked that this is an excited field to do research on. This is not a fast-eloping field and this is not a new technology that changes day-today life. It’s a mixed bag some get the fame and the credibility and others do a lot of propaganda and fake news.  
• Dr. Adrian Haack remarked that this report is one of its kind and is based on the nationwide survey, encompassing over 7400 citizens over one year and highlighted the fact that media consumption has a direct impact on the media itself.
• Prof. Sanjay Kumar said that this report is a humble attempt to do a systematic study. He adds that this is a national wise study incorporating over 7400 people from across rural and urban India.
• Prof. Sandeep Shastri noted that it’s interesting to see the critical citizens seems emerging and the report would contribute towards adding the existing knowledge on important theme. 
• Nalini Singh remarked the report as “forensic, insightful and one- time screenshot”. She also expresses her concerns over the situations of journalists and media industry.
• Abhinandan Sekhri mentioned that the reports like these serve as a starting point as they make the invisible visible. He also stated the fact that to understand the future one has to dig into the past to know better.
• Anurradha Prasad believes that the media is for both for consumers and for clients. She also talked about the revenue generated by the news channel that goes to distribution networks and hoping that the report had a positive impact on the entire ecosystem.  
• Rahul Dev remarked that we need to do more survey to initiate a dialogue about how the people are consuming the media.

OPENING

Prof. Director Awadhendra Sharan, Director, CSDS

Prof. Director Awadhendra Sharan on behalf of the Centre for the Study of DevelopingSocieties and Konrad Adenauer- Stiftung welcomes everyone to the evening’s program. An especially warm welcome to  Dr. Adrian Haack Director, KAS, Pankaj Madan, Deputy Head, India Office, KAS, Prof. Sandeep Shastri Vice Chancellor at Jagran LakeCity University, Prof. Sanjay Kumar, Co-Director of Lokniti-CSDS and all the panelists who have arrived and who likely to arrive soon for joining us to a great event. He stated that this is an exited field to do research on. This is not a fast-eloping field and this is not a new technology that changes day-to-day life. Many questions are being asked about creditability, power, relationships with political parties and relationships with members of the community, and research of different organizations. In addition to all the expansion that happens there is still the problem of differential access, diverse population, and content producer who populated the media and the reports whose views become the carrier. It’s a mixed bag some get the fame and the credibility and others do a lot of propaganda and fake news.  

At CSDS we do a lot of surveys. Over the year we moved from Election surveys to surveys on farmers, surveys on youth, and now the media. As media tries to build its credibility through good practices. We at CSDS also take the pain to design a survey. What we do in our survey is to build credibility not because we are experts in designing a survey but because we take lots of pain to design a good survey. All the ones who do this survey are trained well. Questions were asked about how to report the data. The one factor which distinguishes the large organization which has all the factors and vice versa for the smaller organization is the training factor. In the end, he says that “I am proud and confident that our survey stands respected, credibility, often sighted from the members of the Civil society and parliamentary question were asked from the survey which has done by Lokniti-CSDS”. 

Introductory

Dr. Adrian Haack, Director, the India Office of Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS)

Dr. Adrian Haack on behalf of Indian Office of Konrad Adenauer Stiftung welcomed everyone for this event. We all have come together to present this Media In India: Access, Practices, Concerns and Effects report that is jointly carried out by Konrad Adenauer Stiftung and Lokniti a research programme of Centre for the Study of Developing Society. It is very first of its kind conducted in India that encompassing over 7400 citizens all over India. This study is very comprehensive in nature covering media all in its forms: traditional, new involving. It aims at a better understanding of people's dailies, media consumption, as well as their media related concerns. And on behalf of Konrad Adenauer foundation, I want to congratulate CSDS for their outstanding work. He mentioned that many people are able to talk about and have opinions on abstract topics like education, media consumption, election, etc, but Lokniti-CSDS is providing a representative data and that is actually the difference between science and politics. He mentioned that KAS foundation is working in 80 different offices across the world and that they are working with journalists from Buenos Aires to Nairobi, from Tashkent to Canberra, from Tokyo to Beirut and because of this experience they are aware of the situation of journalists all over the world. Sighting his experience, he said that journalists of the world face one global challenge and that is the change of attention of people. Due to the expansion of digital sphere, the time attention is getting shorter and shorter and less people are reading longer articles. He mentioned that since February 24, their offices all over the world have been monitoring the coverage of Russia-Ukraine conflict. The findings suggest that in some countries the coverage is more intensive than in other, due to the distance. But the framing is also very different. For example, Crimea is a peninsula and one can walk from Crimea to Ukraine without getting wet feet, but there is water between Crimea and Russia. He mentioned that in the media coverage in some parts of the world became an island. It was labelled an Island, and in other parts they stated it as a peninsula. One might just look at it as detail, but this is a political thing as Crimea before 2014 was a peninsula in Russian media, but it now is an island. Therefore, this term is causing a divide in the international media because an island is completely surrounded by water, it can only be a part of one country or the other. Talking about how language creates images, he mentioned that what Russia is doing is being termed in the media as a special military operation instead of war, just to make it sound smaller. 

In his other observation, Dr Haack pointed out that a free press does not necessarily mean a democratic or independent one and this is a global phenomenon. Of course, it is more prominent in totalitarian states like Russia and China, but even democracies like Germany are not exempt from it. He pointed out that although legally there is a free press in many countries, the journalists cannot work freely because of various reasons. The journalists can be independently free but at the same time, their employers, the media houses can be under financial pressure. Mentioning about the relationship between the advertisers and journalists, he said that it is same all over the world.

Dr Haack concluded by highlighting that the media consumption has a direct impact on the media itself and therefore we find so much useful data in this CSDS study. He said that such surveys are needed in every country of the world. This report gives the journalists a very authentic view of their consumers. He thanked CSDS for this really insightful study and its scientific contribution to media and society in general.

Professor Sanjay Kumar, Co-Director, CSDS

Professor Sanjay Kumar started off by joining Director CSDS and Director KAS in welcoming everyone to the event. Talking about the collaborative works of LoknitiCSDS and KAS, he said that they have been working together for the last couple of decades and Lokniti has done a lot of interesting studies in partnership with Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. He then took the opportunity to thank KAS not only for selecting Lokniti as their research partner but for supporting research on various important and relevant topics on a sustained basis for the last two decades. The first Youth Study that the two institutions conducted in 2006 has now become a flagship study of LoknitiCSDS and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. He mentioned about the various youth studies that the two organizations have done and how it has become a wealth of data to study on Indian youth. In addition to this, Prof. Kumar also mentioned about other studies that Lokniti and KAS have done together, including a study on women voters and social media and political mobilization. 

Talking about the report being launched, Prof. Kumar said that this reportis a humble attempt to do a systematic study. The study is based on a survey method and it looks at all forms of media. He said that in the report, they have taken a comprehensive view and face to face interviews to look at media access, it’s effects and concerns expressed by the citizens about the popular media and it’s effect on day to day lives of citizens. He mentioned that this study is a national study incorporating 7400 people from across rural and urban India. The report presents some interesting findings about media and its penetration in the society, the language of media, media biases, censorships, among others.

Professor Kumar concluded by thanking everyone and inviting Prof. Sandeep Shastri to present some interesting findings from the report.             

Professor Sandeep Shastri, Vice Chancellor, Jagran Lakecity University

Professor Sandeep Shastri started off with welcoming the dignitaries on stage and other invitees of the event. He said that it is a difficult to summarize the report which runs into 159 pages and has more than 168 tables. He said that the representation of the report is quite large and that they would have loved to expand it to hill states of Uttarakhand, union territory of Jammu and Kashmir and beyond Assam in north east, but because of logistics they could not do so. He mentioned that they have covered the areas where 97% of the population lives and that the sample is representative of the universe it is supposed to represent.

Talking about the findings of the report, he mentioned that there is a clear 10% increase in the number of smartphone users from the last study we did to the present study, it has gone up from 33% to 43% now and interestingly 99% of the smartphone users have an internet connectivity on their phone. He mentioned that people spend around one-sixth of their day on social media, and if it is added with the additional three hours being spent watching television, it makes up quite a large amount of time that one spends in a day with different media outlets. From the report, he mentioned that 6 out of 10 people would feel very restless without their mobile phones. 

He said that it is interesting to see that the critical Indian citizens seem to be emerging because the level of trust in the information that media provides, moderate trust seems to be the higher form of expression rather than higher forms of trust and the order of trust would be WhatsApp, YouTube, Twitter. Taking the discussion forward, he said that four out of ten media users have serious concerns about the spread of fake news through media. 

After presenting some other findings from the report, Prof. Shastri concluded by hoping that the study would contribute towards adding in the existing knowledge on this very important theme.

Panel Discussion 

Professor Ravi Sundaram

Professor Ravi Sundaram pointed out that the report and the panel for the discussion are remarkable. He laid out that he is not a media practitioner, and is a media scholar. Being the moderator for the session, he pointed out a few questions. He said that since the emergence of media there have been a number of factors that demand something called media experience. First, media is a time technology, it organizes time, rewinds time, it partitions the relationship between leisure and non-leisure. And what is really interesting in the history of media is that, if one takes television, then television has this thing called flow where television’s greatest challenge when it emerged was how do you keep users attached to the television screen. Because the flow organizes something called programming. Prof. Sundaram talked about Raymond Williams’ work on the subject, which states that it is a sequence of programming that attaches viewers to the television, and one just doesn’t feel like leaving. Shedding further light, Prof. Sundaram said that this means a relationship to habit, one starts to organize their time in relation to the screen, and they organize a relationship to light, to sleep. He said that it is interesting to see that this relationship has been radically reversed and now a distinct realm called media no longer exists, we are all media in a way. So, the institutional sites in which media’s power emerged have been transformed. There are different forms of power today, but the classic institutional sites where media can be regulated through censorship, through commercial regulation, that has moved into another realm. The other form is the expansion of this thing we call media. It is the most radical modulation of habit. Prof. Sundaram said that the two pages that really struck him in the report were the people who say that they can’t live without watching TV or without touching their phones. It is the most radical reformation of habit. It’s a micro-temporal intervention.  every second is being measured. This means the television has to change, news has to change because its access to what it designates as its user, is not the classic model of flow. You watch the news at 9 pm, which means the greater intervention of media companies, governments, and television presenters become performers, the borers between television and entertainment become blurred, and people become partisan this is not unique to India, this is happening all over the world. But this temporality of the thing we called news is changed. Following this, Prof. Sundaram invited Mrs. Nalini Singh to her address. 

Nalini Singh

Nalini Singh started by thanking Lokniti-CSDS and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. She called the report a “forensic, insightful analysis” and a “one-time snapshot” of where the media in India is today. She further said that she would make this report a mandatory reading if she had any power over all the media practitioners and journalists. She added that if there was such a report for Bollywood, then we would not have a string of films that flopped, because it gives an insight into what people really are consuming. Now there is a huge category of something called godi media. Now the godi media is media which is sitting in the lap of the govt. She further added that the highest number of poor people in the world live in India and the report has shown that the media is not taking up the issues to the extent required. She emphasized that the issues of the poor, Dalit, scheduled tribes and caste, Muslims, and women should not go unattended by the media and it is worrisome to see this happen.

Mrs. Singh mentioned that the credibility of the media is getting lower and lower. She also expressed her worry about India slipping to 150th rank amongst 180 counties from the 142nd position two years ago in the World Freedom Index. She said that the report has lit a fire and the findings of this report not only present a picture of what’s happening in Indian media, but it also compels the reader to think about the situation that we are getting into. She also expressed concerns about the finding in the report that mentions major media houses of the Country being profoundly pro-BJP. Mrs. Singh asserted that this “unputdownable” report has shown her, as someone who has been a part of many decades, that two fundamental flaws have occurred in the foundations of the media in the country. One of them is that the profit principle has triumphed. She said that the media owners. have actually seen that their profit lies in skimming very close to the government, and, and that the government will have a stranglehold on their businesses, including the media, and many other businesses. She said that her prediction is that they will not let the needle move at all, as far as the bias is towards the ruling party in this case. Even if the government changes, the situation change is less likely as the business will remain the foundation.

The other flaw that she noticed is that the duty of a journalist is now clouded. She said that the report is telling us that journalists have forgotten to be journalists with very notable exceptions. She mentioned a journalist has to have an adversarial relationship with the government, they cannot be friends and cannot sit in their laps because journalists are only here for fostering accountability. She concluded by expressing her concerns over the situation and asking everyone to read this “extraordinary” report.

Abhinandan Sekhri

Abhinandan Sekhri started off by thanking them for inviting him. He mentioned that Mr. Rahul Dev was his boss and that it was really great for him as he had great people to learn from. He mentioned that it is one of the biggest laments that the young generation doesn’t have good people to learn from. He then congratulated LoknitiCSDS and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung for the report. Mr. Sekhri proceeded by saying that his fellow panelists will weigh the merits and demerits of the report, but the question is that why the report? He mentioned that the biggest innovation behind reducing accidents caused by automobiles was a speedometer. To just make the invisible visible is a profound change and this is what reports as these do. He said that reports like these provide data that are an important starting point for any correction through the self-correcting mechanism of societies and industries. He mentioned that his media organization Newslaundry also did a report a few days back which was about women and community participation in newsrooms. He said that he expects such a report to be an annual thing and he hopes that Lokniti-CSDS and KAS have the resources to do that. He pointed out that the report shows that the ownership of digital devices is the least among the Adivasi and scheduled caste communities. He mentioned that this was also pointed out in the report that Newslaundry did of participation in newsrooms and leadership roles. He mentioned that news access and prime time should be about the marginalized sections, poor and underprivileged sections of society but it is not the case. But this is not happening and one of the reasons is that there is a vicious circle where the users are privileged and therefore the issues that are being discussed are a privilege. He mentioned the book Amusing Ourselves to Death written in the 1970s and how it talked about the demise of American society because they were obsessed with television. Some of his observations were correct and some of his predictions were wrong. He said that despite the situation is bad there are people who are standing up and saying what they have to.

Mr. Sekhri further pointed out that news run by an advertiser can not be independent. He mentioned that in the media industry the customer is the advertiser and the consumer is the public. And any industry in which customers and consumers are different cannot be an industry that can do the best use of resources to give the best product. He mentioned that when the public pays for the news, the public is served and when the advertiser pays, the advertiser is served. He further clarified that will only the privileged who can pay will get access to news. Answering this question, he said that this is why human beings matter otherwise robots and AI would take over everything. Just because of what is watched, that is what we will give. There has to be a certain level of editorial guidance. He said that if data was the only deciding factor then slavery would never have ended, untouchability would never have ended, kings and queens would never have ended, and democracy would not have been a thing. He concluded by saying that it is important to understand history, to know what happened in the past so that we can plan better for the future and reports like these serve as a starting point are starting point of anything because they make the invisible visible.

Anurradha Prasad

Anurradha Prasad started by thanking Prof. Sanjay Kumar for the invitation. She further thanked Prof. Sandeep Shastri for his presentation about the key findings of the report. Mrs. Prasad mentioned that since she has never been associated with print media, she would not be able to talk about it, but she will be talking about television and FM as she happens to represent these industries. She said that she is thankful that the report does not place her in any of the categories, the godi media or the so-called elitist media. Adding further she said that it is very difficult to work without an agenda and if her channel was placed in any one of these two categories, she would not be doing justice to her profession. She said that she believes that media is for the consumer and she also believed that media is for the client. Talking about her own journey as an entrepreneur, she said that she knows about the pangs and problems one has to face. She mentioned the data provided by BARC that says out of the whole television universe in the Country, only 5% people watch news. She mentioned how TRP becomes a crucial factor to get an advertiser, because that is the only tool to judge how much to spend on this particular channel. On account of her own journey she talked about the bias that she had to face because she comes from Bihar and political media was supposed to be in English and commercial media was supposed to be from Bombay and political media had to come from Delhi. She also mentioned that the people who were the media leaders at one point of time built the system in a way that it all comes from Delhi University, JNU or any elite college. Talking about FM, she said that the government doesn’t allow news to be on FM and that they have been talking about it for the last fifteen years. The same government has given the license to run a news channel but the same content cannot be put on her Radio Dhamaal. She mentioned that 50-60% of the revenues generated by news channels goes into the distribution networks and paying the cable operators and therefore its obvious that less money will go in content. She concluded by hoping that the report and its findings have a positive impact on the entire ecosystem.

Rahul Dev

Rahul Dev started by thanking Mrs. Prasad for bringing a very critical aspect of the entire media business into discussion which was which has not been the subject of this survey. He expressed that the existing business model of the private media is a critical issue that needs to be addressed. He also congratulated and thanked Konrad Adenauer Stiftung and Lokniti-CSDS for bringing out “this mirror to ourselves”. He said that he agrees with Mrs. Nalini Singh’s suggestion that the report should be an essential reading for every journalist and media owner, and also the political parties and government. Mr. Dev was mystified by the finding that 70% of the digital media users use digital media for news. He said that there is a huge discrepancy as the data of BARC shows that out of the people who watch TV, only 8% watch it for news. There us no clue available as to how this discrepancy will be addressed. 

He added that this report busts several myths under which the journalists, especially “the shouters” and “clowns in the garb of anchors” perform. The myth is that they really matter, that shouting helps. This report should be able to show them the mirror. Talking about another big myth, he said that the private broadcasters have always believed that they matter more than the public news channels, but the survey doesn’t indicate so. The survey shows that the trust in private news organizations is very low. He added that if we look at the other media networks of developed countries, we would not find anchors and captions like we do here. Talking about the media model of the Country, he said that what we have is market and state based and therefore the huge advertising power of government exerts control over what goes in media. Mr. Dev concluded by saying that we need more surveys like these that initiate a dialogue about how the people are consuming the media and what are their opinions about it.  

Vote of Thanks  

Aryan Pandey, Intern, Lokniti-CSDS

Aryan Pandey thanked the panellists for an insightful discussion.

Speaker Profiles

Rahul Dev, Advisor at SGT University (SHREE GURU GOBIND SINGH TRICENTENARY UNI.)

Shri Rahul Dev is the Honorary Advisor with Speaker's Research Initiative, Parliament of India. He is an eminent journalist and language activist. He has been Managing Trustee of Samyak Foundation since 1990. He has over four decades experience in print and television. He had been Editor of Hindi dailies like Jansatta and Aaj Samaj, in television news, as the head of Aaj Tak, Advisor of Zee News, Editor-in-Chief CNEB news channel and prime time anchor of DD News. He also works on developmental, public health and media issues with national and multi-lateral organisations.

Nalini Singh,Veteran Journalist

Nalini Singh is an Indian Journalist. She has been the anchor for several current affairs programs on Doordarshan, and is most known for her program, 'Aankhon Dekhi', on investigative journalism. 

Abhinandan Sekhri, Founder Newslaundry 

Abhinandan Sekhri is the co-founder and CEO of Newslaundry, a media critique, news and current affairs website. Before founding Newslaundry, he worked as a producer, director and writer in television and film projects, including Highway on my Plate, which he co-produced and directed; and news-satire show Gustaakhi Maaf. He is also a co-founder and trustee in Delhi-based non-governmental organisation (NGO) PCRF. He was the executive producer for Chase, a documentary series by ScoopWhoop. He regularly delivers lectures and hosts panel discussions on journalism, RTI, and the importance and independence of media.

Anurradha Prasad, Chairperson and Managing Director News24

Anurradha Prasad started her career in Media with an assignment “Money Matters”, a popular business magazine. She has worked in all the sections of Media from writing, producing, and often both. Prior to her launch BAG Films & Media Ltd, she was working with Press Trust of India. In 1993, she established her own production house “BAG Films & Media Ltd”.                                                  

About the Partners

Mr. Pankaj Madan, Deputy Head to India, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS)

Mr. Pankaj Madan is the Deputy Head of the New Delhi Office of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. He has been with the Foundation for over 30 years in various capacities and is responsible for the conceptualization of development and dialogue programs, research and editing, budgetary evaluations, and monitoring and liaising with Ministries at the state and center levels both, Members of Parliament and State Legislatures, Government Departments, Political Parties, Media and Apex bodies. Before that, he was with the Indo-German Export Promotion (IGEP) project of the GIZ.

Konrad Adenauer Stiftung

The Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) is a political foundation. Established in 1955 as “Society for Christian-Democratic Civic Education”, in 1964 the Foundation proudly took on the name of Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. With 16 regional offices in Germany and over 120 offices abroad, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation is committed to achieving and maintaining peace, freedom, and justice through political education. We promote and preserve free democracy, a social market economy, and the development and consolidation of the value consensus. We focus on consolidating democracy, the unification of Europe, and the strengthening of transatlantic relations, as well as on development cooperation.

The leitmotif of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation "Germany. The next chapter" is supported by a thematic focus. With the three main topics Innovation, Security and Representation, and Participation, it is quite clear which topics the Konrad Adenauer Foundation will focus on in the coming years.

We cooperate with governmental institutions, political parties, and civil society organizations, building strong partnerships along the way. In particular, we seek to intensify political cooperation in the area of development cooperation on the foundations of our objectives and values. Together with our partners, we make a significant contribution to the creation of a global order that empowers every country to determine its own developmental priorities and destiny in an internationally responsible manner. 

The India Office of the Konrad–Adenauer-Stiftung has organized its program priorities into five working areas: 

Foreign and Security Policy 

Economic, Climate, and Energy Policy 

Rule of Law 

Political Dialogue focused on Social and Political Change 

Media and Youth

The India Office of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation takes great pride in its cooperation with Indian partner institutions that implement jointly curated projects and programs.

Lokniti -CSDS

Professor Sanjay Kumar, Co-Director Lokniti-CSDS

Sanjay Kumar is currently a Professor at CSDS and the Co-Director of the Lokniti Programme. He served as the Director of CSDS from January 2014 till January 2020. His main area of research has been Indian Elections, and voting behavior, but using quantitative methods, he has been engaged in conducting research on other themes namely Indian Youth and State of Democracy in South Asia.

He has published several books and edited volumes on Indian elections. Some of his well know books are “Post Mandal Politics in Bihar: Changing Electoral Patterns”, “Changing Electoral Politics in Delhi: From Caste to Class” and “Measuring Voting Behavior in India”. Besides these, he has several other publications to his credit.

He has also worked extensively on issues related to Indian Youth, and co-authored and edited volumes on Indian Youth: (With Peter De Souza and Sandeep Shastri) [“Indian Youth in a Transforming World: Attitudes and Perceptions”, “Indian Youth and Electoral Politics: An Emerging Engagement”. The edited volume “Youth in India: Aspiration, Attitudes, Anxieties” published by Routledge, is his most recent publication on Indian Youth.

He writes regularly for both English and Hindi newspapers like Asian Age, Deccan Chronicles, The Mint, The Hindu, Indian Express, Dainik Bhaskar, and Rajasthan Patrika. He is also a familiar face on Indian Television as a well know Psephologist and election analyst.

Professor Suhas Palshikar, Co-Director Lokniti, Chief Editor, Studies in Indian Politics

Suhas Palshikar, based in Pune, India, taught political science from 1978 to 2016. He is the Co-Director of Lokniti and the Chief Editor of the biannual journal brought out by Sage, Studies in Indian Politics. He was also the Editor of Samaaj Prabodhan Patrika during 19902004. He has been associated with the National Election Studies since the 1996 elections. Professor Palshikar was one of the principal investigators of the international project on Democracy in South Asia (Round One and Round Two). Professor Palshikar writes in English and Marathi on contemporary politics and has also written extensively in academic publications on the theme of democratic politics in India. He has been a frequent contributor to The Indian Express and journals like Seminar and The Economic and Political Weekly. His Marathi books include ‘Rajyashastra Kosh’ (Dastane Ramachandra, Pune, 1987) ‘Maharashtratil Sattasangharsh’ (Samkaleen Prakashan, Pune, 2007), ‘Rajakarnacha Taleband’ (Sadhana, Pune, 2013) and ‘DeshPradesh’ (Unique Foundation, Pune, 2014). Professor Palshikar’s latest English books include, ‘The Last Fortress of Congress Dominance: Maharashtra since the 1990s’ (co-authored with Rajeshwari Deshpande) (2021, Sage) and ‘Politics and Society Between Elections’, (with Siddharth Swaminathan, 2021, Routledge). He is also the Co-Editor of the Sage Series on Politics in the Indian States. Some of his other works include Indian Democracy (OUP, 2017) and co-edited volumes Electoral Politics in India: Resurgence of Bharatiya Janata Party’ (Routledge, 2017) and ‘Party Competition in Indian States’ (OUP,2014).

Professor Sandeep Shastri, Vice-Chancellor, Jagran Lakecity University

Sandeep Shastri is a Political Scientist who is currently the Vice-Chancellor of Jagran Lakecity University and the National Coordinator of the Lokniti Network. He has written extensively on the leadership factor in Indian elections and political parties (Lal Bahadur

Shastri: Politics and Beyond. New Delhi: Rupa and Co. 2019; “The Modi Factor in the 2019 Lok Sabha Election: How Critical Was It to the BJP Victory?” Studies in Indian Politics, Volume 7, Issue 2, 206-18, 2019; ‘The Modi Factor in 2014’ in Palshikar, Kumar, and Lodha, Electoral Politics in India: Resurgence of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Routledge, 2017).

Centre for the Study of Developing Societies

Since its inception in 1963, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies has been recognized as one of the leading intellectual institutions of the global south. CSDS has been supported by the Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR), New Delhi under the Ministry of Education, Government of India since 1969.

At the Centre, we believe that ideas grow out of everyday social and political practices. We, therefore, consider it an important function of intellectuals to stay close to, articulate, and critically comment upon such practices. By remaining alert to the ways in which ordinary people negotiate and reinvent their worlds, and generate alternative systems and imaginations, CSDS has challenged the routes of social and political change that are accepted as ‘normal’. This frequently leads to a productive tension between rigorous scholarly work and living social movements, between academic engagement and political commitment.

The Centre has accomplished a generational transition by reinventing itself in the 21st century, with a fresh commitment to forging links between the social sciences and the humanities, and to discovering non-European lineages of political and ethical thought in Indian languages.

Lokniti is a research programme of the CSDS established in 1997. It houses a cluster of research initiatives that seek to engage with national and global debates on democratic politics by initiating empirically grounded yet theoretically oriented studies. By bringing various projects of the CSDS on elections, democratic politics, and party politics together under a single programme, Lokniti seeks to engage with global debates on democracy.