Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

396 Women’s Livelihood Rights
Sagari R. Ramdas trained as a veterinarian (1986) and has a Masters in
Animal Breeding and Animal Genetics (1991). She has worked with rural
and adivasi communities as a field veterinarian, trainer and researcher
on livestock and people’s livelihoods. Co-Director of ANTHRA, founded
with Nitya S. Ghotge in 1992, she has co-coordinated research on the
gender, caste and class dynamics of indigenous knowledge systems and
livestock production. Currently, her work includes community actionresearch,
training and policy research on livestock production in dryland
agriculture. She has significant publications on livestock production in
the larger framework of people’s rights to food sovereignty.
Gopa Samanta, Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Burdwan,
West Bengal, has a Ph.D. in rural-urban interaction in Burdwan. She has
worked on rural development, poverty, microfinance and gender. In
2004, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Research School of Pacific and Asian
Studies, Australian National University, Canberra. Her current research
interests are gender, livelihoods and empowerment in Burdwan district.
She is exploring, through intensive fieldwork, the dimensions of the life
of settlers on the charlands of the Damodar River, jointly with Kuntala
Lahiri-Dutt. She has publications in national and international journals,
and has also trained as a photographer.
Neera M. Singh is a Ph.D. candidate with the Department of Community,
Agriculture, Recreation and Resource Studies, Michigan State University,
USA. An alumna of the Indian Institute of Forest Management,
Bhopal, she founded Vasundhara, an NGO concerned with natural resources
governance and sustainable livelihood issues, in Bhubaneswar.
Her many years of work on community forestry issues in Orissa is continued
in her dissertation on the emergence of community forestry
federations and their role in furthering the democratisation of forest
governance. She is interested in the processes of networking, approaches
for deepening democracy, participatory action research, and evocative
writing.
P. Thamizoli, now a consultant anthropologist, taught for several years
at the University of Madras where he had obtained a Ph.D., before moving
to the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai, where he was
Programme Director in charge of the tsunami relief and rehabilitation
efforts in Tamil Nadu. His specialisation includes participatory rural