Ashok Pankaj is a professor at the Council for Social Development, New Delhi. His areas of interest and research are: law and political economy of development in India, with a focus on public policy, institutions of governance and development, and interface between democracy and development. He is a keen observer of rural society of India, and has closely followed rural development programmes, especially MGNREGA. He has conducted about two dozen sponsored field based studies on socio-economic developments in India. He has edited four books, viz. ‘Right to Work and Rural India: Working of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS)’, (2012); ‘Subalternity, Exclusion and Social Change in India’, (2014); ‘Dalits, Subalternity and Social Change in India’, (2018); and ‘Social Sector Development in North-east India’, (2020) and contributed numerous articles to reputed professional journals, like Contributions to Indian Sociology, Sociological Bulletin, South Asia Research, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, International Studies, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, Social Scientist, Contemporary South Asia, Poverty in Focus, among others.