Introduction

This special issue mainly presents the work of a number of Japanese scholars working on the South Asian economic development. The articles were originally presented at the Edinburgh-Kobe dialogue on the Economic Development in South Asia held in Edinburgh in May 2018 and organised by the Heriot-Watt University and the Research Institute for Economics and Business Administration at Kobe University, Japan. The dialogue was funded by the Japanese Ministry of Education (via Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) *17H01652), and we are deeply grateful to the ministry for their generous support.

All of the Japanese contributors to this special issue are members of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies (JASAS) as well as the Contemporary India Area Studies (INDAS) programme at the Japan’s National Institute for the Humanities (NIHU). The JASAS was established in 1988 to foster channels of communications amongst the Japanese scholars working on the South Asian economic development. The JASAS holds annual academic meetings and publishes two peer reviewed journals, viz. the Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies (in Japanese) and the International Journal of South Asian Studies (in English). The first has been in publication since 1989 and the latter from 2008. At the time of writing, the membership of the JASAS stands at around 560.

The INDAS programme of the NIHU started later in 2010 to ‘enhance a comprehensive understanding of the dynamism of contemporary India and South Asia and to establish academic perspectives and methodologies that can provide a vision for the future’. The INDAS network is spread across six institutions: Kyoto University (which serves as the central hub), the University of Tokyo, the National Museum of Ethnology, Hiroshima University, the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and Ryukoku University. The INDAS funds eight post-doctoral positions in these six centres. The first group of the eight young scholars have all secured tenured positions in Japanese universities or research institutions. The current membership of the INDAS exceeds to 200.

As is obvious, India attracts a great deal of attention from Japanese scholars and policy makers. This special issue showcases the work of some of the Japanese scholars working on the South Asian economic development.