The Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India is a premier Social Science research institute.
[7] The K. N. Raj Library at CDS is one of the biggest repositories of books in South India with over 1,70,000 titles in economics and related disciplines and subscribing to about 260 print and 2800 online professional journals.
The history of the shaping of public consent for state-sponsored artificial birth-control, the discursive dimensions of community assertion in development, the sub-nationalist ideology bolstered by developmentalism forming the basis of post-independence Kerala, and the discursive dimensions of gender and development have been actively explored at CDS.
They examine the intertwining of development, politics, culture, and social institutions in Kerala that significantly shape the people's well-being.
Recent studies include those of the impacts of extraneous cultural flows that shaped Kerala's specific historical experience of socio-political change in the twentieth century facilitated by mobility across colonial and post-colonial geographies.
Since the 1990s when the 73rd and 74th Amendments of the Indian Constitution came into force, decentralisation and local governance have been crucial to questions of welfare and development in India.
Also, the coming of decentralised democracy meant the expansion of opportunities for women, both in the elected local bodies through reservations and in self-help groups.
At present, there is cross disciplinary and/or interdisciplinary research that brings a gender perspective to bear on problems of labour, livelihoods, politics, health, migration and marriage.
Gendered power relations were implicated even when not explicitly probed in the early research at the centre (1970s) on questions of fertility transition and human development.
Gendered livelihoods have come into focus in the context of self-help initiatives of women even as the persisting low female work participation in India and Kerala has continued to receive attention.
There is ongoing work on state policy and the implication of gender and caste / religious identities in international migration of women workers from South India.
Allied topics like under-nutrition, dietary diversification as well as over/under utilisation of health care are also examined towards commenting upon the healthy makeup of the society.
The significance of enquiries in these two vital areas of human capability needs strengthening with theoretical formulations based on economic principles beyond the empirics that have been our strength till date.
Issues like competition policy, corporate governance, regional concentration and urban formation, diffusion of automation, innovation, disinvestments and CSR have also been well researched upon.
Another study examines the role of the crisis, change in economic policy regime and export performance in the growth trajectory of Indian economy.
Also, historical work on the politics of welfare in pre- and post-independence Kerala, on marginalisation, exclusion, and abjection in development particularly with reference to dalit people and sexual minorities, and local histories on politics and development in micro-sites of extreme marginalisation and deprivation in Kerala have been published.
Most often, descriptive statistics, qualitative methods including interviews of different kinds, focus group discussions, and participant observation, as well as textual and discourse analyses are employed and triangulated.
The 10-acre (40,000 m2) campus, designed and constructed by the architect, Laurie Baker, epitomizes his style and philosophy of adaptive building methods.
The CDS Library is now one of the biggest in South India with over 1,70,000 titles in Economics and allied disciplines and subscribing to about 400 professional journals.