MPhilin Development Practice

Bulletin of Information (2017)

Bharat Ratna Dr B.R.

Ambedkar University Delhi 1

Founded by the Govt. of NCT of Delhi

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 ABOUT BHARAT RATNA DR. B.R. AMBEDKAR UNIVERSITY DELHI

The Bharat Ratna Dr B.R. AmbedkarVishwavidyalaya (Ambedkar University Delhi or AUD for
short) was established by the Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi through an
Act of Legislature in 2007 and became operational on 1 August 2008.
Following the broad guidelines of its Act and drawing inspiration from Dr Ambedkar’s vision of
bridging equality and social justice with excellence, AUD’s mission has beento create sustainable
and effective linkages between access to and success in higher education. In these years, AUD
community has worked towards fulfilling its commitment to creating and sustaining an
institutional culture characterised by humanism, non-hierarchical and collegial functioning, team
work and creativity.

MPHIL IN DEVELOPMENT PRACTICE

Keeping in tune with Ambedkar University Delhi’s (AUD) vision of setting up interdisciplinary
and practice orientated domains/fields of enquiry and engagement, AUD in collaboration with
PRADAN, a leading development sector agent, launched the MPhil programme in Development
Practice (duration: 2 years; credits: 64; seats: 25) in August, 2012. In-house AUD Faculty,
Visiting Faculty, and Field Guides from PRADAN have been working collaboratively to train
MPhil students, both within the university setting and also during their field immersion. The plan
is to offer to the country and to the developmental sector a cohort of 15-20 trained action
researchers every year.

CONTEXT

Going by the State of the World Population 2007 Report (United Nations, New York), even by
2030, at least 60 per cent of the population in India is likely to continue to live in rural
settings.However, there is little societal focus on the issues faced by the rural poor. After 60 years
ofindependence, there remains a huge deficit in the availability of quality human resources to
work in the villages, along with communities.The extant practice of development has failed to
address the lived experiences and the livelihoods-health-education-governance issues of a large
segment of the Indian rural poor since independence.

This does not mean that developmental initiatives of the State and the non-State sector has not
made any change in the lives of the rural poor; but such changes, fostered by primarily
mainstream notions of development, have not been sustained, deep-rooted and participatory,

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especially when it comes to poverty alleviation, cultural and political empowerment, and self-
determination. This requires new thinkingabout development (beyond mere critique), that is
grounded in everyday rural realities, lack of basic services and inability to influence larger
societal processes as also thinking that incorporates local traditions of sharing and collectivity.
The MPhil in Development Practice is the first programme of its kind in India, based on these
premises; it is helping evolve a professional identity for the grassroots worker and is expected to
act as a model for the country and the development sector.

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 RATIONALE

The idea driving the MPhil in Development Practice is that a new kind of training – in rural
development and transformational skills – is required to fulfill India’s bottom-up version of the
developmental dream, that is in turn seeking to link ‘transformation of self’ with larger goals of
social justice and collective transformation.

The programme is based on a learner-centered and immersion-based pedagogy. The structure of

the field and course work allows for reflection-based learning, so that the learner can draw on real
life experiences to understand and engage with key conceptual ideas as well as ‘grounded-
theory’.

The programme will also strengthen action research skills, particularly in relation to developing
appropriate methodologies, both participatory and practice-oriented, for answering critical
questions arising from and arising in the field.

The programme provides the conceptual, methodological, and emotional skills for a unique
progression from understanding the rural context and problematizing the developmental issues
therein to engaging with processes of change and transformation.

OBJECTIVES

The core aims of setting up of the discipline of Development Practice are bridging the inherited
divide between theory and practice, natural and social science, self-perspective and group-
perspective, individual research and collaborative research. This is also a movement towards a
repositioning of the social sciences (as also humanities) – repositioning it in terms of its direct
conversation with society and not just the market). It is also a movement towards ‘problem
solving’ modes of research and knowledge production that is tuned to the needs of the
contemporary social.

The MPhil in Development Practice has two broad objectives –

 To

(a) Institutionalize in a University-setting the professionalizing of development practice

(as socially meaningful)
(b) De-institutionalize the current imagination of the University (academic, urban, elite)
through its partnership with a grassroots level development agent of change
(PRADAN) and take it to the rural sector, i.e., to make University work relevant to
rural roots.
 To build ‘capacities’ in terms of developing and increasing the pool of quality human
resource in the development sector.

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The MPhil programme in Development Practice revolves around a five-fold agenda –

 Develop a critical-analytical-reflective relation with the mainstream discourse of

development.
 Engender a kind of self-transformation; engender perhaps a ‘non-coercive reorganization
of desire’.
 Learn to relate with groups and learn to work in community contexts.
 Develop a framework for Action Research in collaboration with the rural community.
 Learn to relate with and transform institutions (family, rural community, self-help groups,
State, panchayats, gram sabhas, etc.)

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 R
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d PREAMBLE

‘Development’ as a concept has multiple connotations, and the complexity of its many contours
and trajectories has become an area of intense contestation in the social sciences, especially in
what has now come to be known as the ‘development sector’. The MPhil in Development
Practice, through
(a) an examination of


the unexamined ‘underdevelopment of the rural’; the
equally unexamined ‘royal road to Development’, and
(b) the setting up of a long-term and intimate relationship with the rural through a ten month
immersion-based-training in rural contexts

wishes to give birth to an Action Researcher who would have the capacity to initiate
transformative social action in rural India. The MPhil in Development Practice attempts to
introduce each year into the development sector a cohort of 15-20Action Researchers imbued
with alternative visions of development and innovative grassroots level action plans borne out of

(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
(e)
a critical-analytical engagement with extant theories of development
rural immersion
praxis-based learning
self-reflection
engaged scholarship

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 IMMERSION

The focus of Immersion I (Jan-Feb, 2nd semester) is primarily on the ‘self’. This two-month
Immersion divided into Village Stay (in a rural household, for 1 month) and Village Study (for 1
month) is about setting the compass of the inner self, in the direction of becoming an action
researcher. It is about being in touch with one’s inner conviction, conviction to work in the rural,
with the rural poor, and among poor women. However, Immersion I is not just about the self but
also about also about extending oneself towards community/groups and learning to relate with
them.

The focus of Immersion II is on the Community and on Group Processes. It is about setting up a
relation with the rural community/group; it is about finding community/group voice; but also
about extending oneself (and community) towards a shared research agenda – a research agenda
emerging out of the needs of the community. Immersion II is about deepening and bringing
clarity to the Action Research question/agenda.

The focus of Immersion III is on Action Research; it is about setting up a relation with the
research question, about conducting research and moving towards research findings; but also
about extending the research findings towards Action and Institutional Change – even if minimal.

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 RESEARCH AS ENGAGED SCHOLARS

The MPhil programme strengthens research skills, particularly in relation to developing

appropriate methodologies, both participatory and action-oriented, for answering critical
questions arising from the field. It is envisaged that dissertations would involve reflective
exercises applying analytical tools to understand the implications of specific development
interventions in which the learner may have been involved themselves.

Immersion II was envisioned as having two purposes – to have a sound understanding of groups
and group processes, and to deepen one’s nascent action research question. However, the
deepening of the Action Research question is not something one does alone. To put it
telegraphically: it is not done in the ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’ mode. One is expected to do it in the
‘we’/‘us’ mode. The idea is to deepen the Action Research project in collaboration with the
community/group one is working with. The idea is to also see what the community/group ‘need’
is and relate ‘my need to know’ with the ‘community/group need to transform’; thus bring the
two needs to a productive dialogue and a dialectic; reach a middle ground/path. The community
thus has ownership over the research that is being conducted in its village. It is involvedin our
research. The community also wishes to build on our research and develop/design a frame of
action/change/transformation.

EMPHASIS ON EXPERIENCE

A practitioner working in rural settings with the ‘poor’ faces continuous challenges and dilemmas
in relation to her/his own role and positionality vis-à-vis the community. It is not easy to work
long-term in rural areas; given the primarily urban or semi-urban upbringing of most university
students, it requires a higher level of psychic resilience. The programme would therefore address
important personal conflicts and self-doubts that may arise out of one’s rural location by enabling
the learner to be self-reflexive and in touch with one’s own emotions, which in turns enables a

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kind of sensitivity to be in tune with the needs and feelings of rural Others. Interactions based on
feelings of mutual respect, and willingness to listen and learn, can potentially transform the lives
of both, the practitioner and the community.

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 SEMESTER WISE COURSE LINE-UP (Credits per course in parenthesis)

COURSE SEMESTER SEMESTER SUMMER SEMESTER SEMESTER

I II III IV
IMMERSION

Pre-Course Integrated Rural Livelihoods (2)

Immersion and Natural Resource
Orientation Management (2)
Courses at Kesla
The Experience
of Development
CORE INTERDISCIPLINARY

Understanding Gender and Politics, Resistance,

the Rural (4) Development ( 2) Change (2)
Equality,
Experiencing the Discrimination, Intervention,
Self – Relating Marginalization, Inclusion, Collective
with Self and and Development Action (2)
Others (4) ( 2)
Environment,
Philosophy of Natural Reflections on Justice
Development Resources, and (2)
Practice (4) Development Discourses on Well-
( 2) Being (2)
COURSES

Listening,
SEMINARS/WO RESEARCH
METHODS

Introduction to Learning, and

Research Communication
Methods (2) (2)
Participatory
Research and
Grassroots
The Action
RKSHOPS

Researcher/Reflective
Practitioner (2)

Preparatory Pilot Study for

IMMERSION

Village Stay Immersion II – Immersion III – Action Research: Action Research;

Village Study and Developing Village Stay; 20 weeks (12)
Stay;10 weeks (2) Competencies; Immersion III:
10 weeks (2)
REFLECTIVE

Group Processes Group Processes III

PRACTICE

II (2) (1)
Group Processes
I – (1) Rural through
Art, Literature,
and Film (4) 12
 AUD FACULTIES AT CENTRE FOR DEVELOPMENT PRACTICE

Prof.AnupDharPhD in Philosophy. Works at the interface of the political and psychoanalysis,

which offers him a way to rethink questions of ‘transformative social praxis’ in largely adivasi
(and dalit) contexts in central India. Editor of CUSP: journal of studies in culture, subjectivity,
psyche (http://cuspthejournal.com/). Co-authored books include Dislocation and Resettlement in
Development: From Third World to World of the Third (Routledge, 2009), World of the Third
and Global Capitalism  (Worldview, 2012) and The Indian Economy in Transition:
Globalization, Capitalism and Development (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Co-edited
books include Breaking the Silo: Integrated Science Education in India  (forthcoming: Orient
Blackswan, 2017), Psychoanalysis in Indian Terroir: Emerging Themes in Culture, Family, and
Childhood in India (forthcoming: Lexington Book’s [Rowman & Littlefield Publishing
Group] Psychoanalytic Studies: Clinical, Social, and Cultural Contexts Series, 2017) and Clinic,
Culture, Critique: Psychoanalysis and the Beyond (forthcoming: Orient Blackswan).  

Dr.Ishita Dey is an Assistant Professorwith Centre for Development Practice, Ambedkar

University Delhi. Her areas of interests are food studies and labour studies. She has also worked
on conditions of labour in IT/ ITes industry in an urban township – Rajarhat, Kolkata and labour
in Special Economic Zones. She has a co-edited volume Sustainability of Rights After
Globalisation (Sage, 2011) and co-authored a work Beyond Kolkata. Rajarhat and the dystopia
of urban imagination  (Routledge, 2013)

Dr.Imran Aminis a political scientist by training and has worked on the rationality and practice
of governmental power in the governance of violent conflicts. His areas of research interests
include Governance as Practice, Conflict Governance, and Governmentality of Development. He
has authored a book chapter Theorizing State, Governance and Citizenship: Historical
Trajectories (2015). He has co authored an article on Homogenising Discourses of Governance.
Identity and Autonomy in Jharkhand (2015), as well as a policy brief on “Conflict, governance
and development”, forCultures of Governance and Conflict Resolution in Europe and India,
Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) (2013). He has also written modules on Public Policy
Analysis and Governance, for e-Post Graduate Pathshala, Ministry of Human Resource
Development, Government of India (2014).
 

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Ambedkar University Delhi
Kashmere Gate Campus
Lothian Road
Delhi –110006
http://www.aud.ac.in/

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