Prabhat Datta, Honorary Adjunct Professor
He is Centenary Professor of Public Administration,
Calcutta University. His specializations include Indian government
and politics, democratic decentralization in India in general
and West Bengal, in particular. He is Honorary Advisor to Mass
Education Extension Department, State Institute of Panchayats
and Rural Development (SIPARD) and Institute of Local Government
and Urban Studies (ILGUS), Government of West Bengal.
He has authored 13 books and four monographs in English and 6 books in Bengali. Some of his recent publications are as follows :
cheap cigarettes Major issues in Development Debate: Lessons from India (1998 ), Kanishka Publishers, New Delhi.
Panchayats , Rural Development and Local Autonomy : The West Bengal Experience (2003), Dasgupta & Co. Kolkata.
Women in Panchayats in West Bengal (2003), Dasgupta & Co. Kolkata.
Towards Good Governance and Sustainable Development (2003), Dasgupta & Co. Kolkata.
He contributes to important national and international journals in social sciences. He is the editor-in-chief of Urban Management, an academic journal, and Poura Diganta, a quarterly journal in Bengali published by ILGUS. He is also the joint editor of Saksharata Samachar, a quarterly newsletter published by State Literacy Mission Authority.
He has participated in many international conferences, seminars and workshops. He was invited by the Government of People's Republic of China to present a paper on the Indian experience of democratic decentralization in an international workshop on democratic decentralization held in Beijing in 1996. The Centre for Development Research, Copenhagen, invited him to speak on the rural development experience in West Bengal in the conference of the Asian Scholars held in Copenhagen in 1998. He delivered two lectures on environment and development with special reference to joint forest management in West Bengal at the Centre for Environment and Development, University of Oslo, in 2003. The programme was sponsored by the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India. Currently, he is working as one of the researchers of an international research programme on Local Politics, Poverty and Decentralization conducted at the Danish Institute of International Studies in collaboration with other research institutes and universities of both the South and the North.