Intersecting Paths of Sustainable Development, Urbanization, and Women's Empowerment: 22nd Annual Conference of Indian Association of Social Science Institutions (IASSI), CESS, Hyderabad, India, 2-4 November 2023

This volume is a collection of 14 conference papers discussing India's development story around the three themes of sustainable development goals (SDGs), agricultural productivity and sustainability, and climate change - mitigation and adaptation. The contributions take cognizance of India's increasing growth rate over the past 10 years or so, leading to reduced extreme poverty; virtual elimination of absolute poverty in urban areas; and visible improvements in education, health, sanitation, infrastructure, and energy sectors. The volume unravels how despite the high and sustained economic growth rate achieved by India in the recent past, employment generation has been far from satisfactory. It looks at emerging concerns including rising inequalities, child under-nutrition, and environmental challenges, including the rising frequency of climate change-induced extreme weather events that threaten the progress towards sustainable development. 

The book discusses pressing societal challenges such as income inequality, climate change, and inclusive development. It presents research on social challenges exacerbated by globalization, emphasizing the need for resilience in diverse geographies as presented by India. The empirical research presented by the book provides pointers to the policymakers on the core issues of the conference. 

Revathi Ellanki is a Development Economist and the current Director, Centre for Economic and Social Studies (CESS), Hyderabad, India. Her broad areas of research are agriculture, development economics, and gender studies with attention to land, labour, tenancy, work participation, and empowerment. She worked earlier on issues of agrarian crisis, rural indebtedness, farmers' and weavers’ suicides, farmers’ collective institutions and rural labour markets, human development, and water and sanitation. Currently she is working on women’s access to land and land rights. She has supervised six research scholars for their MPhil and PhD theses and has good experience in organizing empirical studies and drawing policy-related findings from them. She is Principal Investigator for the Young Lives Child Poverty study an international longitudinal interdisciplinary research project led by the University of Oxford.

Ishwar Awasthi is Professor at the Institute for Human Development, Delhi, India. Previously, he was Professor at the Giri Institute of Development Studies, Lucknow, India. He is an alumnus of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, obtained his Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. He works in the areas of labour, employment and livelihood issues and on development evaluation. He has contributed over 6 dozen papers in the professional journals and published two books -- ‘Livelihood Diversities in Mountain Economy, Constraints and Opportunities’ (2012) and ‘Women and Labour Market Dynamics: New Insights and Evidences’ (co-authored, 2019). He is a managing editor of IASSI Quarterly, a journal of the Indian Association of Social Science Institutions.

B. Suresh Reddy is Associate Professor at the Centre for Economic and Social Studies (CESS), Hyderabad. Since past three decades he has been mainly working on the issues of ecological agriculture/ organic farming/dryland agriculture and uses participatory research methods. He also had the opportunity of working at DDS- Farm Science Centre (funded by ICAR) in Sanga Reddy district of Telangana state as an Agricultural Extension Scientist. For half a decade during the early 2000, he was also a free-lance researcher/ consultant and has carried out research assignments for overseas institutions such as Department of Agricultural Economics and Social Sciences, Humboldt University (Berlin), International IIED,U.K, NRI of Greenwich University-UK, ODI and School of Engineering and Environment, University of Southampton of U.K. He is supervising 4 PhD scholars. He is co-author of two books. He has to his credit more than 50 national and international publications covering broad fields of dryland agriculture, soil fertility management, ecological pest management, biofuels, organic farming and uncultivated foods.

Aditi Madan is Associate Fellow at the Institute for Human Development (IHD), New Delhi, India. She is currently an ICSSR post-doctoral fellow at IHD with a PhD in Disaster Management from Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok and M.A. in Disaster Management from TISS. She has more than 8 years of work experience primarily in the research field. She has prior experience of working with organizations such as Iqvia (Delhi), International Growth Centre, Voluntary Health Association of India (Delhi), United Access Medical (Bangkok), ILO (Delhi), National Institute of Disaster Management, Delhi Disaster Management Authority and Gujrat State Disaster Management Authority (Ahmedabad). She has undertaken several research projects for clients in the development sector such as USAID, the UNION, Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Ministry of Home Affairs, Department of Planning and Department of Social Welfare (Government of Delhi), Her expertise lies in conducting qualitative research, development of survey tools, field coordination and supervision. Some of the past work includes conducting field research, surveys, stakeholder interviews, FGDs, Case studies, KIIs as well as undertaking desk review, formulation of reports, copyediting, development of proposals, content development for conceptual notes, abstracts, presentations, audio-visual documentation, communication material for dissemination and experience in social media space. She is Editorial Assistant with the Indian Journal of Human Development (IJHD), a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary journal, published bi-annually by IHD.