The Radical in Ambedkar

Anand Teltumbde is a leading public intellectual and civil rights activist. He is currently general secretary of the Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights and is associated with the All India Forum for Rights to Education as a member of its presidium. Teltumbde is a regular contributor to Economic and Political Weekly, where he writes a monthly column titled ‘Margin Speak’. An engineer with management qualifications from India’s top institutes, Teltumbde has been the CEO of a holding company. He currently teaches in a business school of IIT, Kharagpur.

Suraj Yengde is a Shorenstein Center inaugural post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has worked with leading international organizations in Geneva, London and New York, and is associate editor of Caste: A Global Journal of Social Exclusion. His writings have featured in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Social Transformations, Economic and Political Weekly, Huffington Post, Hindustan Times, the Indian Express, the Conversation, Globe and Post and Mail and Guardian, among other leading publications. His first book, Caste Matters, is forthcoming from Penguin Random House India.

Cynthia Stephen has been actively involved in the development sector for over 25 years as an activist, writer, trainer and policy analyst on gender, poverty, development and social exclusion. She has been the State Programme Director, Mahila Samakhya Karnataka, and was also a member of the Ramesh Kumar Committee. She has done doctoral research in the area of women’s political participation, with special focus on women from marginalised communities She is the Founder Director of the Training Editorial and Development Services Trust.

V. T. Rajshekar, is an Indian journalist who is the founder and editor of the Dalit Voice, which has been described in a release by Human Rights Watch as “India’s most widely circulated Dalit journal”. He was formerly a journalist on the Indian Express, where he worked for 25 years. He is the founder of the ‘Dalit Voice’ organisation a radical wing of the broader movement for Dalit interests. He is also the author of a great number of pamphlets and books, mainly published by his own organization

Achal Prabhala is a writer and researcher in Bangalore. He works on intellectual property and its application to medicine and knowledge, towards increasing access to both. Between 2004 and 2006, Prabhala coordinated the Access to Learning Materials project in South Africa; since that time, he has been a visiting researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town, and has worked with several non-profit organisations in India. He is on the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation, and is a member of the expert advisory group of the Medicines Patent Pool.