NALSAR appoints Gopalkrishna Gandhi, P Sainath as Distinguished Profs

Hyderabad: The NALSAR University of Law has designated former Governor and diplomat, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, and noted journalist and Magsaysay awardee, P Sainath, as Distinguished Professors.

The honorary position of Distinguished Professor has been instituted to bring within the fold of the NALSAR academic community public intellectuals of stature, whose involvement with the University’s academic programme would enhance academic discourse and knowledge production.

“We wanted to broaden the scope of legal education and expose law students to substantive questions of justice”, said Prof. Krishna Deva Rao, Vice-Chancellor of NALSAR University of Law.

The University hopes that the designation of public intellectuals will ensure that learning of the law is not just technical in nature. “Rather, students will have an opportunity to reflect on deeper questions of social and economic justice and engage with impact of the law in practice.”

Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a Distinguished Professor of History and Politics at Ashoka University, India. He is, by training, an administrator.

His illustrious working career has included public administration, diplomacy, and the exercise of constitutional responsibility, wherein he served as the High Commissioner for India in South Africa, Lesotho, Sri Lanka and Ambassador of India in Norway and Iceland. He also served as Governor of the State of West Bengal from 2004 to 2009. He received the Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan Award from the University of Mysore in 2016, the Lal Bahadur Shastri Award in 2016 and the Rajiv Gandhi Sadbhavana Award in 2018.

P Sainath, Founder-Editor of the People’s Archive of Rural India and former Rural Affairs editor at The Hindu, is a veteran journalist with over 30 years of rural reporting under his belt.

He is the recipient of more than 60 national and international reporting awards including the Fukuoka Grand Prize in 2021, the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2007 and the inaugural Amnesty International’s Global Human Rights Journalism Prize in 2000. His book ‘Everybody Loves a Good Drought’ is a Penguin modern classic and is in its 60th reprint. His most recent book, ‘The Last Heroes’, documents the lives and contributions of the foot soldiers of the Indian freedom struggle.