New Delhi: The scientific board of the Trivedi Centre for Political Data, housed within Ashoka University and set up by Professor Gilles Verniers, has announced that it will be dissolving itself because they were not informed or consulted before important decisions were made about the Centre. Verniers, the Centre’s founder and director, was “forced to leave”, the board said in an open letter.
After having left Ashoka, where he was Assistant Professor of Political Science, Verniers is now Karl Loewenstein Visiting Fellow at Amherst College in Massachusetts.
The board members – comprising reputed academics from across the world and a former Indian chief election commissioner – have stated that they agreed to this role because of the respect they have for Verniers’ work and the importance of publicly available political data. The datasets released and maintained by the Trivedi Centre have received acclaim from multiple quarters in the seven years since the Centre’s inception, they say.
“Currently, data made public through the TCPD website is a primary source for nearly all scholarship and commentary on Indian politics. The data are frequently used by scholars and journalists and have a substantial impact on the research and coverage of Indian elections. These data have also found their way into other major public data repositories, including the CLEA dataset at the University of Michigan and the SHRUG database from the Development Data Lab, to name a few,” the open letter says. In addition, the Centre also played a key role in training and mentoring students at the university.
Announcing the dissolution of the board, the open letter says, “Given this track record of excellence, we were surprised and disappointed that we, as the Scientific Board, were not consulted before substantial changes were made governing how the Centre is run and situated within its home institution, in breach of academic norms.”
Read the full open letter below.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here
