The Director and Chief Executive Officer, Eswaran Sridharan, is the Editor of the US-based journal about contemporary India, India Review. It is the only refereed pan-social science quarterly in the United States that is dedicated to India, and is published by Taylor & Francis under their Routledge imprint. This is also the only US-based refereed academic social science journal that is being edited offshore from India.

This project seeks to explore India’s and China’s emerging foreign assistance policies and programs and is being undertaken in 2012 and 2013. Prof. Xue Lan, Tsinghua University, is author of the China paper. The project is supported by the International Development Research Centre, Canada.

This project plans to examine the interactive dynamics of economic integration and security competition/cooperation of India in the larger Asian and Indian Ocean region, factoring in the roles of global powers, and global and emerging regional regimes.

This project attempts to analyse the factors behind the duration of state governments in India, including defections and splits of parties in Indian state assemblies, and develop an “opportunism” score for state assemblies and state-level parties, and then try to relate opportunism to duration and state-level economic performance by various indicators. The project is being undertaken in collaboration with the Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi, led by Prof. Bhaskar Dutta, with participation from Dr. Sugata Dasgupta, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

This project consists of three papers by E. Sridharan, building on earlier work, two undertaken in collaboration with Prof. Rajeev Gowda, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, on patterns of election and party finance in India, its relationship with corruption, and possible reform options drawing on international comparative experiences of regulation and reform in this policy sphere, and based on fieldwork with party leaders and functionaries and with donors. The first paper, by Gowda and Sridharan, was published in Election Law Journal, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2012.

The Case of Indian Muslims in Comparative Perspective

A paper comparing the representation of dispersed minorities, that is, those that are so distributed as to be in a minority in most parliamentary constituencies, in single-member constituency, first-past-the-post electoral systems, is being undertaken. The focus is on Muslims in India and comparative reference groups are Indians in Malaysia, African-Americans in US House of Representatives elections and Hindus in Bangladesh.