Publish Date
12 Sep, 2025
About This Book
‘Dr Bhaskara Rao has been India’s pre-eminent public opinion analyst and a pioneer in social audit and countrywide surveys…[His] deep analysis will lead to new solutions that can improve the quality of research at all stages.’—Dr R.A. Mashelkar, former Director, CSIR, and recipient of the Padma Vibhushan ‘Independent and transparent research is vital for good governance. It can even safeguard against bad governments,’ writes Dr N. Bhaskara Rao, a pioneer in social research and countrywide surveys. In this book, backed by over five decades of experience, he then goes on to show how such research has declined in India from the golden period of the first few decades after Independence. He tracks the turns that social and policy research has taken over the last 70 years—slipping from a position of rare professional integrity and credibility to a worrying low in both role and status. The reasons, he shows—all of them inter-related—are the preoccupation of recent political regimes with....
About The Author
N. Bhaskara Rao is a pioneer of social research in India. He is Founder-Chairman of the Centre for Media Studies (CMS) and of Marketing and Development Research Associates (MDRA). Earlier, he built up the equally prestigious Operations Research Group (ORG) as its CEO. He was a member, with Dr M.S. Swaminathan, of the high-level government committee that drafted the National Population Policy, and an expert-member of the committee that reorganized the media units of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry. His published books include India 2021 (1985), Social Impact of Mass Media (1996), A Handbook of Poll Surveys in Media (2009), Sustainable Good Governance, Development and Democracy (2018), Citizen Activism in India (2018) and The TRP Trick: How Television in India Was Hijacked (2019) and The Third Eye of Governance: Rise of Populism, Decline in Social Research (2021).
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