A Kick-Off Meeting was held on May 18-19, 2017 in Dublin City University. All the beneficiary Partners, the Indian Universities and the non-University Partners were invited to attend and at least one representative from each was present. In this meeting, progress on recruitment of the ESRs and the content of the first Network Event were finalised. At the time of the ‘Kick-Off meeting’ recruitment of the ESRs was already underway. A common strategy was agreed by the beneficiary partners prior to this meeting for recruitment as outlined in Deliverable D2.1.
Each Network Meeting had and will continue to have a training component. In this period the training focused on delivering Strand 1: Research Design and Methods training and Strand 2: Fieldwork and Empirics training as outlined in the Project description (part B). Elements of Strand 4 have also been addressed with fellows engaging in sessions on Academic writing for publication and writing for non-academic audiences. The Indian partners gave their expertise in policy-making and policy document writing. At least, one member has represented each institution at all Meetings.
The Global India network will have held 4 full network events by March 2019. These have been hosted by IBEI, KCL, University of Warsaw, and KU Leuven. Each event has been attended by all ESRs and at least one member representative of institutions of the consortium. The events have combined training and teaching sessions aimed at the ESRs, public outreach events aimed at publicising the network, promoting the study of EU-India relations and engaging with the relevant practitioner and policymaking communities, and network management meetings including engagement between the management board and the ESR’s. Non-Academic and Indian University partners have also been represented and involved in each event, including at planning discussions at the management meetings. For example, in London 23-24th April 2018, the 2nd Network Meeting, the Fellows were asked to prepare a short paper outlining their research question and explaining how it related to the existing literature. At the meeting, they presented these papers and appropriate discussants were assigned for each thematic session. Given the two-day even, discussions were held in two sets of two parallel sessions with 3-4 fellows presenting in each. Each fellow was assigned an academic or NAP discussant appropriate to the topic. In Leuven, 10-13 March 2019, for the 4th Network Meeting, ESR’s have been asked to submit draft articles that will be used for the review sessions on academic writing on Wednesday 13th. They will also present progress reports to the Project Officer and external expert as part of the Mid-term review meeting on Monday 11th March. The fellows will also meet as a group with the Project Officer.
