SWEDISH SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES NETWORK
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Ananda Edirisuriya, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV),
Stockholm University and Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), will defend his doctoral dissertation on
”Design Support for e-Commerce Information Systems using Goal, Business
and Process Modelling”, on Tuesday 20 November 2009, at 14.00. Faculty opponent is Prof. Michael Petit, Computer Science Faculty, University of Namur, France. Mr. Edirisuriya is working as a senior lecturer in the Dept. of Statistics and Computer Sciences, University of Sri Jayawardenepura, Sri Lanka, and has been involved in a split PhD program for Sri Lankan doctoral students organised by Stockholm University/KTH. His main research interest is IT systems in business process management, and enterprise modelling. Venue: DSV, Forum, Sal C, Isafjordsgatan 39, Kista.
Jawad Ali, Dept. of International Environment and Development Studies (Noragric) at the
Norwegian University of Life Sciences in Ås, defended his doctoral dissertation project titled ”Deforestation in the Himalayas: Mainstream views, institutional failure and ‘alternative systems’. A case study from Northern Pakistan”, on Wednesday 10 June 2009. The evaluation committee was headed by
Dr Are Knudsen, Research Director, Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI), Bergen. Jawad Ali has studied the ongoing deforestation in northern Pakistan, and has found that local fuelwood collection is not the main cause. Instead, the estimated deforestation of about 30% during the last three decades is primarily due to commercial harvesting and mismanagement by the government. A large amount of dead fallen wood and green trees was sold by the government or was taken out by a “timber mafia” that emerged during the main period of commercial harvesting in the 1970s and 80s. Venue: Auditorium, Agricultural Museum, Ås (30 km from Oslo).
Anisur Rahman, International Maternal and Child Health (IMCH), Department of Women’s
and Children’s Health, Uppsala University defended his doctoral dissertation project titled ”Prenatal Arsenic Exposure and Consequences for Pregnancy Outcome and Infant Health: Epidemiological Studies in Bangladesh” on Tuesday 19 May 2009. Anisur Rahman has worked on arsenic exposure in pregnancy and effects on foetus and
child. He has also been affiliated to the Division
of Metals & Health, Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska
Institutet, Stockholm. The aim of this thesis has been to analyse possible effects of prenatal arsenic exposure on foetal and infant health. The setting is Bangladesh, where two cohorts were studied, both part of a health and demographic surveillance system in Matlab. The faculty opponent was Prof. Gunnar
Nordberg, Dept of Public Health and Clinical Medicine, Umeå University. More information.
Magdalena
Bjerneld, International Maternal and Child Health (IMCH), Department of Women’s
and Children’s Health, Uppsala University defended her doctoral dissertation titled ”Images, Motives, and Challenges for Western Health Workers in Humanitarian Aid” on Wednesday 17 May 2009. The faculty opponent was Prof. Lars Dahlgren, Division of Epidemiology and Public Health Science, Umeå University. The thesis presents how humanitarian aid workers were attracted, motivated, recruited, and prepared for fieldwork, and how they reported their work experience directly from the field and when they returned home. Data were derived from interviews with experienced aid workers, focus group discussions with presumptive aid workers, analysis of letters from aid workers in the field on MSFs homepages in Europe, and from interviews with recruitment officers at some of the main humanitarian organisations. More information.
Dissertations before January 2009
The
Asia-Pacific Population Research in Ageing (APPRA) is a network of researchers, NGO workers and civil societies based at the Oxford Institute of Ageing (OIA), University of Oxford, UK. The APPRA network initiates links and collaborative programmes between research institutions in Asia-Pacific region and the Oxford Institute of Ageing (OIA). It also tries to build a bridge between Asia and the Pacific scholars and policy-makers and will provide an opportunity to promote research collaboration, and the pooling of ideas as well as sharing experiences on ageing issues from countries across the Asia-Pacific region. The network members have the opportunity to focus on critical issues of common concern for the ageing population in the region and countries around the globe. Limited fellowship opportunities are also available for short research programmes. Current OIA research activities in Asia include a project on ”Health and ageing in Bangladesh”, where the focus is concentrated on the socio-demographic changes at macro and micro levels and their impact on health and
ageing issues in Bangladesh, and a project on ”Poverty and vulnerability among older people in South Asia”. Dr. Hafiz T.A. Khan is the coordinator for APPRA. More information.
The Gender and Health Equity Network, GHEN, is a partnership of national and international organisations concerned with developing and implementing policies to improve gender and health equity, particularly in resource constrained environments. Three countries are participating in the GHEN project: India, China and Mozambique. GHEN began as part of The Global Health Equity Initiative, started by the Swedish International Develoipment Cooperation Agency, Sida, Harvard University and the Rockefeller Foundation. The secretariat is based at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex University, UK, with support from Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. The Network Steering Group is chaired by Professor Gita Sen of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.
GADNET (Gender and Development Network) is another
Sida/SAREC funded multidisciplinary national network of Swedish
researchers and doctorate students. The network, with
specific research interests in gender and development, was formed
in April 2004 and is institutionally based at Global Gender Studies, School of Global Studies at Gothenburg University.
Dr. Gunilla Blomqvist, Division of Peace and Development Research (PADRIGU) is the GADNET coordinator. The network is funded by Sida/SAREC for the period 2004-09. GADNET organises activities such as seminars and conferences
all over Sweden, via key contact persons (called nodes) at different
universities and university colleges. They form
sub-divisions of the national network. GADNET regularly arranges
DreamCatcher workshops, as they are called. The 2009 GADNET Dreamcatcher/GADIP workshop is entitled ”Gendered Resistance at times of Economic Crisis”, and was held at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg on Friday 30 October 2009.
Pakistan Studies Group, was founded in the mid 1980s to address the frustration of scholars of Pakistan, geographically and culturally an extremely heterogenous country, encompassing aspects of South Asian, Middle Eastern and Central Asian cultures. The primary activity of the PSG has beento organise yearly Pakistan Workshop in the Lake District in England. Events that have attracted anthropologists, sociologists, economists, political scientists, geographers, demographers, missionaries, historians, development workers as well as non-academic members of the Pakistani community in Britain.
Gendering Asia Network is a Nordic network addressing researchers and students at Nordic institutes who are engaged in research on gender in Asia. As much Nordic research on gender in Asia consists of collaborative research in continuous dialogue with research by scholars in Asia as well as in other parts of the world, the network also invites scholars from the region of Asia and elsewhere to participate. Annual workshops are held, the first one in Kungälv, 19–21 May 2005.
The Indic Studies Network (IsNew) was established at the Conference on Religions in the Indic Civilisation, held in New Delhi in December 2003. This nascent organization aims to bring together individual scholars and academicians from the fields of religious and cultural studies of the region, providing linkages and a forum for vibrant intellectual study. IsNew is based at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, India.
International AIDS Economic Network (IAEN) provides data, tools and analysis on the economics of HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment in developing countries, to help developing countries devise cost-effective responses to the global epidemic. The network began in 1993 as an informal group of researchers, policymakers, program administrators and others from development agencies, multilateral institutions, universities and NGOs. IAEN is a partner of Oneworld.net.
Global Health Watch is an alternative World health report, coordinated by the School of Public Health, University of Western Cape, South Africa. It is a broad collaboration of public health experts, non-governmental organisations, civil society activists, community groups, health workers and academics, initiated by the People's Health Movement, Global Equity Gauge Alliance and Medact. One of the intentions is to draw the attention of health workers and the World Health Organisation to the issues of food security, agriculture and nutrition as health issues. Go for the Global Health Watch for 2005-2006.
South Asia Network of Economic research Institutes (SANEI) is a regional initiative aimed to establish strong research interlinkages among diverse economic research institutes in the South Asian region. SANEI has a membership of 48 research institutes, 11 from Bangladesh, 22 from India, 3 from Nepal, 7 from Pakistan and 5 from Sri Lanka. The head office is in New Delhi.
SANEI in turn is part of the Global Development Network (GDN) – a collaborative initiative of development institutions globally, based in Washington, USA.
The research network SAATHII (Solidarity against the HIV Infection in India) strengthens the capacity of organizations working against the HIV/AIDS epidemic in India through networking, information dissemination, technical assistance and advocacy. It tries to bring together govenmental and non- governmental organizations, within and outside of India, working on HIV issues.
The Health & Development Networks (HDN) is a non-profit organisation who manages and moderates electronic discussion forums on international health issues, on behalf of the Swiss organisation Fondation du Present. Among the several e-mail discussion forums that are going on the SEA-AIDS Forum is focused on HIV/AIDS in the Asia-Pacific region, and Shohojogi-AIDS is a national forum on the AIDS situation in Bangladesh.
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(See also SASNET’s
page with published books!)
”the toxic combination of bad policies, economics, and politics is, in large measure responsible for the fact that a majority of people in the world do not enjoy the good health that is biologically possible. Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale.”Much of the work to redress health inequities is also said to lie beyond the health sector. According to the Commission's report, ”Water-borne diseases are not caused by a lack of antibiotics but by dirty water, and by the political, social, and economic forces that fail to make clean water available to all; heart disease is caused not by a lack of coronary care units but by lives people lead, which are shaped by the environments in which they live; obesity is not caused by moral failure on the part of individuals but by the excess availability of high-fat and high-sugar foods.”Consequently the report recommends that the health sector – globally and nationally – needs to focus attention on addressing the root causes of inequities in health.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Year Book 2008 is the fifth annual report on the changing environment produced by Nairobi based UNEP in collaboration with many world environmental experts. The UNEP Year Book 2008, published on 12 March, highlights the increasing complexity and interconnections of climate change, ecosystem integrity, human well-being, and economic development. It examines the emergence and influence of economic mechanisms and market driven approaches for addressing environmental degradation. It describes recent research findings and policy decisions that affect our awareness of and response to changes in our global environment. In three sections, the UNEP Year Book 2008 focuses on recent environmental events, developments, and scientific findings: A Global Overview, A Feature Focus, and an Emerging Challenge section. More information on UNEP Year Book 2008.
A Karl Reinhold Haellquist memorial books collection has been established at the Lund University’s Asian Library, located within the premises of the Centre for East and South East Asian Studies and SASNET in the Alfa 1 building at Ideon Research Village. The renowned Swedish scholar Karl Reinhold Haellquist who passed away in 2000 was a historian specialised on South Asia and for more many years working at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) in Copenhagen. His wife Inger Sondén Haellquist has donated 5 000 volumes from her late husband’s private library. It has partly been catalogued and hopefully it will soon be publicly accessible. More information.
The Queen Elizabeth House Working Papers Series, University of Oxford. Distributes research papers free of charge via Internet in order to stimulate discussion among the worldwide community of scholars. Recent papers in the Series related to South Asia include "Commercialisation, Commodification And Gender Relations In Post Harvest Systems For Rice In South Asia” by Prof Barbara Harriss-White, and ”Religious Schools, Social Values and Economic Attitudes: Evidence from Bangladesh” by Mohammad Niaz Asadullah (Reading University) and Nazmul Chaudhury (World Bank).
The Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics (HPSACP) is a series of interesting research papers in the field of Political Science since the year 2000 published by the Dept. of Political Science at South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg.
An India based initiative was launched on 27 February 2006 to provide researchers and others open access to millions of journal articles online. The Open J-Gate project is also a searchable database of journal literature, indexed from 3000+ open access journals (more than 1500 of them are peer-reviewed scholarly journals), with links to full text at Publisher sites. It is a contribution of Informatics (India) Ltd , and its web portal, updated every day, currently gives links to more than one million open access articles. Go to the Open J-Gate web portal.
Nepal Research is a website on Nepal and Himalayan Studies run by Dr. Karl-Heinz Krämer, Dept. of Political Science at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg. It links up with research papers on the political development in Nepal.
Working Papers from the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in the UK are available as pdf-files on-line. ODI is Britain's leading independent think-tank on International development and humanitarian issues, and in the period 2002–September 2005 there were 98 papers produced, 29 of which deal with South Asia. India predominates during this period, with researchers working on Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh being especially active.
Academic research papers online are now easily accessible with Google Scholar. This additional service was introduced by the World’s leading search engine Google in January 2005. Specific searches for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports, are now made possible. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means the search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.
The Indian Institute for Studies in Industrial Development (ISID), a national-level public funded research and educational institution affiliated to the Indian Council of Social Science Research has taken a lead in making available its working papers on the Internet so that interested scholars can download them for free. The research deals with industrial development, with special emphasis on the problems of India and its relationship with other countries of the world. Go for the Working papers.
Besides publishing the yearly Human Development Reports UNDP also publishes reports for individual countries and regions. The Pakistan National Human Development Report 2003, subtitled ”Poverty, Growth And Governance” was launched on 1 July 2003. The 2003 report examines for the first time new questions such as: How do distorted markets for goods and services result in the loss of income for the poor?, and how do local structures of power (landlords, local officials, etc…) deprive the poor of their income and assets? More information on the report.
The web site Disaster Diplomacy, Cambridge University, in association with Radix (Radical Interpretations of and Solutions for Disasters), presents a large number of papers and background material on disasters Worldwide. It tries to examine the role of disaster in international affairs and international relations as well as applying the principles and results to internal political situations. Thomas Myhrvold-Hanssen has written a piece entitled ”Democracy, News Media, and Famine Prevention: Amartya Sen and The Bihar Famine of 1966-67”, on the relationship between democracy and famine through a critique of Amartya Sen's suggestion that democracy is the best way of preventing famine. The Bihar famine in India from 1966 to 1967 is used as the main case study, but the famine in Sudan from 1986 to 1989 is also examined. Go for the paper (as a pdf-file)
A Background paper on the ”Impact of Conflict on HIV/Aids in South Asia”, written by PhD K S Subramanian in August 2002 is now available through SASNET. The report makes a rapid appraisal of the impact of conflict on HIV/AIDS in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Iran, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. It is intended as a strategic document, written from the perspective of policy professionals and decision makers outside the health sector, with help from UNDP, which sponsored the study. Go for the report! (pdf-file).
The Stockholm International Water Institute organizing
the World Water Weeks at Stockholm every year, has begun to make
its reports available free of charge at its web page.
Among the titles available are found the reports on: • Balancing
Human Security and Ecological Interests in a Catchment; •
Water Security for Cities, Food and Environment – Towards
Catchment Hydrosolidarity; and • Water Management in Developing
Countries: SIWI Recommendation for EU Development Co-operation.
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SASNET - Swedish South Asian Studies Network/Lund
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Ferdinando Sardella, 
Matilda Palm, 
Karolina Härnström, 
Dinesan Vadakkiniyil, 
Frida Hastrup, 
Anna
Laine, 
Mattias Larsen, 
Geir Heierstad, Dept. of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (
Ingrid Dash, 
As a follow-up to this 2006 Annual conference, the steering committee of the Network decided to publish the papers presented in a volume edited by Ashok Swain, Ramses Amer and Joakim Öjendal. The book was finally published in December 2007, with the title ”Globalization and Challenges to Building Peace” (Anthem Press, London). 
DevNet
Dr. 
The Pak Institute for Peace Studies (
The Human Development Report 2009 was launched on Monday 5 October
2009.
The report, Overcoming barriers:
Human mobility and development, investigates migration in the context of demographic changes and trends in both growth and inequality. It also presents more detailed and nuanced individual, family and village experiences, and explores less visible movements typically pursued by disadvantaged groups such as short term and seasonal migration. The starting point for the HDR 2009 (which is the 20th yearly HDR report) is that the large inequalities
in the global distribution of opportunities are a major driver
for movement of people. The main message is that mobility has
the potential to enhance human development - among movers,
those who stay and destination communities. In practice, however,
processes and outcomes can be adverse to movers, and
there is an important role for better policies and institutions at
the national, regional and international levels. 
The magnitude of
losses and wastage in the food chain is put forward in a report titled “Saving Water: From Field to Fork – Curbing Losses and Wastage in the Food Chain,” published by the International Water Management Institute (
On April 8, the Global Monitoring Report 2008 was published. This new World Bank-IMF report entitled ”MDG:s and the Environment – Agenda for Inclusive and Sustainable Development” warns that most countries will fall short on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of eight globally agreed development goals with a due date of 2015. Though much of the world is set to cut extreme poverty in half by then, prospects are gravest for the goals of reducing child and maternal mortality. Serious shortfalls also likely in primary school completion, nutrition, and sanitation goals.
The report also stresses the link between environment and development and calls for urgent action on climate change. To build on hard-won gains, developing countries need support to address the links between growth, development and environmental sustainability.
The 2008 Global Monitoring Report was authored by a team led by Zia Qureshi (photo to the right), Sr Adviser with the World Bank's Development Economics Vice Presidency, under the guidance of the Acting Chief Economist, Alan Gelb.
Regarding South Asia, the report says the region is on the path toward sustainable economic growth, with net adjusted saving on the rise, and a positive savings rate. The region is likely to halve by 2015 the number of people without access to safe drinking water, but will not achieve the same target for improved basic sanitation. 
The theme of the World Bank's World Development Report (WDR) 2008 is ”Agriculture for Development”. A reconsideration of agriculture’s role in development has been long overdue. Developing country agriculture is caught up in the far-reaching changes brought by globalization, the advent of highly sophisticated and integrated supply chains, innovation in information technology and biosciences, and broad institutional changes—especially in the role of the state and in modes of governance and organization. The final report was published on Friday 19 October 2007. 
UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, presented its 2007
State of World Population Report on Wednesday 27 June 2007.
UNFPA is an international
development agency that promotes the right of every woman, man
and child to enjoy a life of health and equal opportunity. It has
its headquarters in New York, USA. The theme for the 2007 report
is ”Unleashing
the Potential of Urban Growth”, and deals with the
fact that in 2008, for the first time, more than half of the
world’s population – 3.3 billion people – will
be living in urban areas. This unprecedented shift could enhance
development and promote sustainability – or it could deepen
poverty and accelerate environmental degradation. 
In
order to fill a gap for teaching materials with special relevance
to Swedish and European development policy studies,
the 
The
lack of relevant teaching material has however become evident,
and therefore good essays and reports by previous masters students
at CAS, as well as more in depth original material within the
field of development studies, will now be made accessible and
published electronically in this Perspectives series. The initiative
comes from Lennart Wohlgemut (photo to the right), guest
professor at CAS. During 2006 he has written the first four reports
in the series, namely: ”
A
new World Bank Report tited ”AIDS in South Asia. Understanding
and Responding to a Heterogeneous Epidemic” was
launched at the 
The
peer-reviewed Journal of South Asian Development (JSAD) is now
fully available online. The biannual magazine is published
by Sage India and distributed worldwide. It is edited by Rajat
Ganguly, Senior Lecturer in Politics & International Studies
at the School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia,
Norwich, UK. The first volume came out in April 2006, and includes
articles by Pranab Bardhan about ”Awakening Giants,
Feet of Clay: A Comparative Assessment of the Rise of China and
India”; by Premachandra Athukorala about ”Outward-oriented
Policy Reforms and Industrialisation: The Sri Lankan Experience”;
Raymond C. Taras about ”Rising Insurgency, Faltering
Democratisation in Nepal”
and Joseph Devine about ”NGOs, Politics and Grassroots
Mobilisation: Evidence from Bangladesh”. 
The World Health Organisation WHO published a report on Violence
Against Women on Monday 23 November 2005. The report,
titled
”Multi-country Study on Women's Health and Domestic Violence
against Women. Initial results on prevalence, health outcomes and
women's responses” presents initial results based on interviews
with 24 000 women in 19 countries around the Globe by carefully
trained interviewers. The study was implemented by WHO, in collaboration
with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM),
PATH, USA, research institutions and women's organizations in the
participating countries. The Swedish Development Cooperation Agency,
Sida, has supported the project from the beginning, and Prof. Lars-Åke
Persson, 
The Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) presented a report on
”Sustainable Pathways to Attain the Millennium Development
Goals – Assessing the Role of Water, Energy and Sanitation” for
the UN World Summit held in New York on 14 September 2005. The 
The most extensive mass poisoning in the World presently takes
place in Bangladesh. At least 35 Million people drink
arsenic contaminated water from wells, dug at a large scale
by Western development assistance organisations, including
the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Sida,
since the 1970’s. This catastrophe has been highlighted
in Swedish media during the Spring 2005 after an investigative
story by Karin Bojs och Per Snaprud in Dagens Nyheter. 
Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor of physics at Quaid-i-Azam University,
Islamabad, in a new article reiterates his strong criticism
of the Higher Education Commission and its ongoing ”revolutionary
programme” of reforming the country’s universities. 
The 
On 7 August 2006 the United Nations Research Institute
for Social Development (UNRISD) based in Geneva, Switzerland,
launched a redeveloped version of their web site, 
The
Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL)
in New York USA enhances teaching and learning through the purposeful
use of new media. CCNMTL builds course web sites to
develop advanced projects that act as demonstrations and explorations
of pedagogical and curricular possibility. One such South Asia
related project recently published is a multimedia presentation
of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar's famous ”The Annihilation of
Caste” presentation. Ambedkar was the first highly
educated (Ph.D., Columbia University), politically prominent
member of the Hindu "Untouchable" castes., and wrote
this paper for the 1936 meeting of a group of liberal Hindu caste-reformers
in Lahore. After reviewing the speech, conference organizers
revoked Dr. Ambedkar's invitation. He then self-published the
work, which became an immediate classic. It is now being edited
for classroom use by Fran Pritchett; with explanatory annotations;
and several other major texts by Dr. Ambedkar. Faculty interview
videos have also been added and a timeline created. 
The Lancet, the world's leading independent general medical journal
(1.1 million registered users), in 2005 introduced a new series
called Neonatal Survival, focusing on the issue of child
survival. The aim behind Neonatal Survival is to erase the excuse
of ignorance for public and political inaction once and for all.
The series is the product of a partnership between scientists, health
workers, and journal editors. The Lancet has decided to support
this important public health campaign by making this special issue
available through the Internet at no cost. Professor Zulfiqar Bhutta,
Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan, is one of the main contributors
to Neonatal Survival. 
The 