India's Risks: Democratizing the Management of Threats to Environment, Health, and Values

A prospective superpower, India is still grappling with a host of risks that threaten to hamper its progress. These range from environmental threats caused by GM crops and pollution; dangers to health from HIV/AIDS and maternal mortality; safety concerns about natural hazards, nuclear power, and industrial disasters; and challenges to livelihoods and values. Some of the issues that this volume explores are: what counts as an 'acceptable' risk, and who decides? How should divergent perceptions of risks be reconciled? And, where is the line between science and politics? Advocating a more multidimensional approach to managing risks, the authors challenge many of the dominant perspectives in India. The field of risk research, which has emerged over the last 40 years in the West, has been relatively unexplored in India. In an effort to bridge this gap, this volume brings together Indian and Western scholars and practitioners across the fields of psychology, anthropology, law, politics, sociology, public health, philosophy, science, and architecture, who offer insights on the theory of risk, lessons from the West, and the realities of risk in India. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/9780199450459/toc.html Contributors to this volume - AJAY BAILEY is an Assistant Professor at the Population Research Centre at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences in the University of Groningen; FREDERIC BOUDER is Assistant Professor in the Department of Technology and Society Studies, Maastricht University; M.V. RAJEEV GOWDA is Professor of Economics and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore; MATHEW IDICULLA is a graduate fellow at the Law, Governance and Development Initiative at Azim Premji University, Bangalore; ROHIT JIGYASU is a conservation architect and risk management consultant from India, currently working as UNESCO Chair professor at the Institute for Disaster Mitigation of Urban Cultural Heritage at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan and Senior Advisor at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS); BANEEN KARACHIWALA has been associated with various organisations at the national and international level for the last 7 years, providing support in research, documentation and programmatic interventions in the fields of health and development; ASHA KILARU is a public health researcher based in Bangalore, India. She works with different networks and people's movements on social justice in health, primarily in the area of maternal and child health in the state as well as at the national level; SHANTI MAHENDRA is a public health research and communications specialist. She has substantial experience in field-based research and programmatic work and has specialist skills designing, implementing, managing, monitoring and evaluating programmes on maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health; ZOE MATTHEWS, originally a statistician and demographer, currently works on international health, specializing in health systems with a particular focus on reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health; CLAIRE MAYS (AB Harvard 1981; DESS U. Paris 1985) is a social psychologist and research consultant at Institut Symlog de France; ERIK MILLSTONE is a Professor of Science Policy at the University of Sussex, in England; RAPHAELLE MOOR is currently working as Senior Consultant, Disaster Risk Reduction at IMC Worldwide; MARC Poumadere, programme director of the Institut Symlog, France has been engaged as a social scientist in risk research for almost 30 years; M.V. RAMANA, a physicist by training, is with the Nuclear Futures Laboratory and the Program on Science and Global Security at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University; RANJANI RAMASWAMY obtained her Masters in Cultural Reporting and Criticism (CRC) from New York University (NYU); BHARGAVI S. RAO is Coordinator (Education)/Trustee of Environment Support Group, a not for profit research, training, campaign and advocacy initiative in Bangalore, India; LEO F. SALDANHA is Coordinator/Trustee of Environment Support Group, a not for profit research, training, campaign and advocacy initiative in Bangalore, India.