RESIDENT FACULTY

Faculty

At IDC, we have eminent academicians, professionals, journalists, administrators and social activists working with us and we are totally committed to egalitarian thinking and the progressive movement. Also, IDC has been collaborating actively with various organisations, institutions and government agencies in various development and research projects. A brief profile of our faculty members is given here:

Prof. J. N. Joshi

Prof. J. N. Joshi, the chairperson of IDC Governing Body, is a leading expert on elementary education. He was Secretary to the Punjab Education Reforms Commission and member of a committee constituted by the Ministry of Human Resource Development on minimum levels of learning. His main interest and specialisation is educational planning and elementary education. He has recently supervised a policy research document on cost-benefit analysis of the Government's primary education system.

Dr. Pramod Kumar

Dr. Pramod Kumar is Director, Institute for Development and Communication (IDC), Chandigarh. His work focuses on three interrelated themes of politics of development, violence and governance; politics of conflict management and resolution and practice of democracy through empirical methodologies and analysis of public policy and people's movements. He is a recipient of the prestigious Homi Bhabha Award for the year 1988-1990 for his work on Causation and Forms of Ethnic Conflicts and Inter Ethnic Co operation in India.

He has held numerous visiting assignments, including visiting Professor at the Department of Conflict Resolution and Peace Research, Uppsala University, Sweden, and the Legal Studies Department, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary .

Beginning with his first work on Violence and Indian Politics, Dr. Kumar's research interests include Ethnic Divides in a Multicultural Society, Political Economy of Punjab, Peace Building and Conflict Management in South Asia, Post Conflict Reintegration, Politics of Deprivation and Discrimination with Special Reference to Dalits, Policing in a Multicultural Democratic Societies and Combating Terrorism with Implications for Citizen Rights. He has conducted a number of field-based studies on Good Governance and Law Enforcement, Coalition Politics in India, Rural Suicides in Punjab, and Quality of Urban Governance.

Dr. Kumar is a Director of 'Altus', a Global Alliance for Promotion of Social Justice, The Hague, The Netherlands; Member of Transcend, a Peace and Development Network for Conflict Transformation by Peaceful Means and a Member of Governing Body of Centre for the Study of Society and Secularism (CSSS), Mumbai. He is also Chairman of the Punjab Governance Reforms Commission.

His Research engagements include publications with recent works being South Asia Predicament: Hostage to Conflicts and Peace Deficit (2008), Dynamics of Electoral Party Politics in Punjab: From Separatism to Cooperative Federalism (2008), Polluting Sacred Faith (1992), and co-author Mapping Criminal Justice Delivery in India (2009), Victims of Militancy (2001), Punjab Crisis : Context and Trends (1984) and (edited) Towards Understanding Communalism (1992). He has contributed a series of research articles on Electral Politics in India in books on Indian politics i.e. 1998 Elections: Regionalism, Hindutva and State Politics (1999), India's 1999 Elections and 20th Century Politics (2003) and India's 2004 Elections: Grassroots and National Perspectives (2007) edited by Paul Wallace and Ramashray Roy and published by Sage. He has also written and contributed research articles on Dalit Identity, Violence and Terrorism, Coalition Politics in edited books.

In recent years, Dr. Kumar's participation in professional forums includes presentations on Rule of Law Indicators at Vera Institute of Justice, New York (2008); Police Accountability Spectrum and Security Sector Reforms in Central European University, Budapest (2007), Police Complaints System in Nigeria in CLEEN Foundation, Lagos (2006) and in a number of seminars organised by Ford Foundation and Altus Global Justice Alliance in The Hague, Beijing, Moscow, Santiago, Los Angeles, etc. He has also actively participated in workshops on issues relating to Conflicts in South Asia, Religious Violence and Peace Building in Uppsala University, Sweden, University of Missouri-Columbia, USA, and University of Victoria, Canada and in various other forums.

He has also provided international forums for Policing Terrorism (2009), Identifying Peace Issues for Research in South Asia and courses on Conflict Resolution between 2005-2007. He is also a regular contributor to popular journals and newspapers on themes relevant to contemporary social and political reality. read more.......