President Pranab Mukherjee will inaugurate the final silver jubilee international conference on ‘Bihar and Jharkhand: shared history to shared vision’ to be organised by Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI) here on Friday next. The Governors and Chief Ministers of both Bihar and Jharkhand will also grace the occasion.
Giving this information ADRI member-secretary Shaibal Gupta said the five day event would be dedicated to the memory of eminent journalist and author Arvind N Das and a galaxy of scholars from within the country and abroad would participate in the mega conference. “Over 150 scholars including over 60 from foreign universities and institutes shall deliver talks, present papers and deliberate on discussions on the path that the States of Bihar and Jharkhand would traverse in the near future apart from musing on the shared histories of development, agitation, decline and divergences leading to the present,” he said.
Gupta said scholars from prestigious universities around the globe including Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, California at Berkeley, london School of Economics, National University of Singapore will deliver talks at the five day conference. Another interesting feature of the conference would be congregation of over 100 select academics, by invitation, from all the universities of Bihar and Jharkhand and they have been invited by the Governments of the two States as the conference is being supported by the Higher Education Council of the two States.
The scholars from abroad include Johannes Breman, Johan Harriss, Wendy Singer, Anand Yang, Crispin Bates, Camille Buat, Catherine Servan-Schreiber, Daniel Rycroft, David Boyk, Jeffery Witsoe and others. lord Meghnad Desai is the chairman of academic advisory committee of the celebrations to be concluded on March 28 with Alpa Shah of lSE as main speaker Jharkhand Governor Draupadi Murmu and CM Raghubar Das would attend the valedictory session.