It is an ‘ongoing’ series from the prestigious internationally reputed Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), setting out compelling, multidisciplinary perspectives on development issues vis-a-vis ecology, identity questions, and lifestyles — in fact, vis-a-vis the whole range of cultural variables and definitions.
From the post-world war II decolonizaion to about mid-1980s, mainstream development thinking has focussed on ‘economics’, on the one-dimensional abstraction of homo economicus, to the exclusion of all else: specially the socio-cultural context in which development might take place. This divorce of ‘development’ from ‘culture’, however, was ‘poor economics’ — a hard fact, which international community has come to discover gradually, experientially. The United Nations too was not found wanting in its shared concern for culture. On 21 January 1988, it launched — under the aegis of Unesco — “The World Decade for Cultural Development” in its effort to chiefly (a) strengthen awareness of cultural dimension of development, and (b) enrich cultural identities the world over.

As a part of the Unesco Chair activities, in the Indian capital, IGNCA organized, from time to time, multidisciplinary discourses/conferences on development issues vis-a-vis the whole range of cultural variables and definitions. Which its Culture and Development series: Volumes 1-6, has covered in entirety.