About FAS

The Foundation for Agrarian Studies is a charitable trust based in India and established in 2003. Its major objectives are to facilitate and sponsor multi-disciplinary theoretical and empirical enquiry in the field of agrarian studies in India and elsewhere in less-developed countries. It does so in association with a wide section of people interested in the agrarian question, including persons associated with academic institutions, social and political activists, members of mass organizations working in the countryside, and other professionals and scholars.

Since 2005, a major area of concern of the Foundation has been an India-wide programme of village studies, titled the Project on Agrarian Relations in India. The project involves description and analysis, and the creation of a detailed database on village India in diverse agro-ecological and socio-economic regions of the country.

In practice, the Foundation is a network of academics and other scholars, including faculty members and research fellows at the Indian Statistical Institute, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, and other institutions. It has an office in Kolkata with a small core of whole-time research staff.

The current work of the Foundation covers six main areas:   

• The Project on Agrarian Relation in India (PARI)
• Dalit Households in Village Economies
• Methods of Village Study
• Human Development Reports
• Archives of Village-Level Databases
• Publications and Dissemination