Grass-Roots Democracy in India and China

Manoranjan Mohanty is a renowned political scientist and China scholar whose writings have focused on theoretical and empirical dimensions of social movements, human rights, the development experience and the regional role of India and China. As Vice-President of the Council for Social Development (CSD) and Editor of CSD's social science journal Social Change, published by SAGE, he brings a wealth of experience from both policy and practice perspectives. He is also Chairperson, Development Research Institute, Bhubaneswar, and Honorary Fellow, Institute of Chinese Studies (ICS), Delhi. Until 2004, he was Director, Developing Countries Research Centre, and Professor of Political Science at University of Delhi where he taught until his retirement. Former Chairperson and Director of ICS and former Editor of China Report, he has been on visiting assignments in several universities and research institutes in India and abroad including University of California, Berkeley; Institute of Far Eastern Studies, Moscow, Oxford, Beijing, Copenhagen, Lagos; University of California, Santa Barbara; and the New School, New York. Professor Mohanty has been a part of the founding and evolution of ICS, the Developing Countries Research Centre at University of Delhi and Gabeshana Chakra and Development Research Institute in Odisha. He has also been closely involved with the People's Union for Democratic Rights, Delhi, and the Pakistan-India People's Forum for Democracy since their inception. He was part of the founding process of the Boao Forum for Asia in China and REGGEN, the Third-World sustainable development network in Brazil. His other contributions include 'China's Reforms: The Wuxi Story' in China after 1978: Craters in the Moon (2010), Ideology Matters: China from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping (2014), 'Political Discourse on Public Sector Reforms in India and China' in Public Sector Reforms in China (2014) and 'India, China and the Emerging Process of Building a Just World' in Building a Just World: Essays in Honour of Muchkund Dubey (2015).

Contact Prof Manoranjan Mohanty at:
University of Delhi and Council for Social Development, Delhi
Email: mm@csdindia.org; mmohantydu@gmail.com George Mathew is Director, Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi. The founder of the Institute of Social Sciences, he has been on the forefront of research on and promotion of democratic decentralisation in India and has taken a leading role in the international forum on federalism. His major publications include Panchayati Raj: From Legislation to Movement (1994, 2002), Communal Road to a Secular Kerala (1990) and Panchayati Raj in Jammu and Kashmir (edited, 1990). He has also produced an award-winning feature film, Swaraj: The Little Republic (2002).

Richard Baum is Professor of Political Science, University of California at Los Angeles. He was also the director of the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies (1999-2005). A student of Chinese politics and foreign policy, he has written and edited eight books, including Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping (1996) and Reform and Reaction in Post-Mao China: The Road to Tiananmen (1990).

Rong Ma is Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology and Director, Institute of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Beijing. He is a scholar of ethnic relations, migration, urbanisation, education and rural development. Besides having published a number of articles in various journals, he has authored Introduction to Sociology of Ethnicity (2005) in Chinese, Population and Society in Tibet (1996) and co-edited On Development of China's Frontier Regions (1993).