MoU with Manipal University, Jaipur

On May 30, 2018 at Manipal University in Jaipur, an MoU was signed by Dr Rajesh Tandon, Dean, PRIA International Academy (PIA) and Dr Vandana Suhag, Registrar, MUJ for collaboration between the two institutions in the areas of academic teaching and research.

It is increasingly being realized that universities need to think and act ‘differently’ in order to deal with the contemporary challenges of inequality and unsustainability. The glass bubble of learning in Indian Higher Education Institutions needs to be broken, to allow ‘new’ forms of knowledge to integrate with pure, academic knowledge taught at universities. Manipal University, Jaipur (MUJ) took a first step in this direction by entering into a MoU with PRIA International Academy (PIA), the academic wing of Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), based in New Delhi.



This partnership paves way for a number of initiatives which will be jointly led by both institutions, such as joint conduction of research studies, student/staff mobility between the two institutions, publishing books/articles, and joint conduction of academic/practitioner conferences and seminars. There are three specific and important areas of cooperation and partnership: (1) Developing and offering joint courses on participatory development, democracy, social justice and gender issues (including a post graduate diploma course on managing participatory development programs & accountable governance and participatory democracy); (2) providing internship opportunities to MUJ students in field based projects; (3) joint teaching in various academic courses and developing collaborative community-university research partnerships.

Professor Madhura Yadav, Director, School of Architecture and Design at MUJ and Dr Tandon at PIA will lead the collaboration at their respective institutions. Through their partnership, MUJ and PIA have committed to fostering an environment of engaged teaching, collaborative research and holistic learning of students, in order to make the teaching-learning process in higher education of value not only to the students, but also to society at large.
This mutually beneficial community-university research partnership grows out of the Knowledge for Change (K4C) initiative. K4C aims to build capacity of next generation of researchers in Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR). K4C program was launched in India in November 2017.