Political Science in India: Who Teaches What, to Whom and What for?

New Education Policy: Notes from Academic Hinterlands

“…At both these levels, the importance of ‘doing’ humanities/social sciences is acknowledged. The present forum has often addressed these issues in the past where the need to create and strengthen multiple, context-specific social science discourses at the regional level (rather than mere translations of textbooks from English to regional languages) was highlighted (Deshpande, 2013). The two notes here, once again, underline the dire need to make political science accessible to its students!…”

Why Do We Need Election Studies in Political Science Classrooms?

“…He argued ‘how an integrated approach to the study of elections could not only provide better insights into the functioning of Indian democracy but could also rescue the discipline of election studies from the “intellectual exhaustion” that it faces currently’ (Yadav, 2007, p. 367). However, perhaps the intellectual exhaustion was not confined to election studies and prevailed over the overall structuring of the discipline of Political Science in India (Deshpande, 2013). As a result, the conversation on conduct of empirically grounded and theoretically sophisticated meaningful election studies remained, by and large, an internal conversation among a few scholars engaged in election studies.…”