He has conducted extensive media research and over a dozen nationwide surveys to determine how people make sense of political, cultural and social processes around them. Vipul Mudgal was awarded doctorate in Media Sociology by Leicester University, U.K., in 1995 on media and political violence. He was also awarded the Nehru Centenary British Fellowship in 1991 and US Govt’s Jefferson Fellowship by the East-West Centre, Hawaii, in May 2003. He has presented academic seminars at the universities of Oxford (Queen Elizabeth Hall), Cambridge (Trinity College), Leicester (CMCR), and Hawaii (East-West Centre) among many other places. He is frequently invited for lectures, particularly on democratic responses to terrorism, at the Administrative Staff Colleges, communication courses for senior Armed Forces Officers and at the National Police Academy, Hyderabad. The Publics and Policies Programme focuses on issues of participatory democracy and mobilises academic knowledge and research for policy making. As the director of the programme Vipul also works on issues of development alternatives, food security, land and displacement, and transparency in legislative processes.

Siddharth Varadarajan is a journalist and senior fellow at the Centre for Public Affairs and Critical Theory, New Delhi. He was until October 2013 the Editor of The Hindu. An economist by training, he studied at the London School of Economics and Columbia University and taught at New York University before returning to India to work as a journalist. He has been a visiting lecturer at the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley and a Poynter Fellow at Yale University.He has reported on the NATO war againstYugoslavia, the destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas by the Taliban regime inAfghanistan, the war in Iraq and the crisis in Kashmir.Varadarajan has edited a book titled Gujarat:The Making of a Tragedy which is about the 2002 Gujarat riots.

After studying economics at the London School of Economics and Columbia University, Varadarajan taught at New York University for several years before joining The Times of India as an editorial writer in 1995. In 2004, he joined The Hindu, as deputy editor. He worked as the Hindu’s Chief of National Bureau, succeeding Harish Khare, who was named as then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s media adviser, in June 2009. In May 2011, the shareholders of Kasturi and Sons Ltd. held an extraordinary general meeting and voted to appoint Varadarajan as The Hindu’s editor on the recommendation of the company’s board, thus making Varadarajan the first professional editor of the newspaper in its 150 year history. Prior to his appointment, The Hindu’s editors were drawn from the family of the company’s owners. On Oct 21, 2013, Varadarajan publicly announced via Twitter, his resignation from The Hindu, citing a change in policy by the owners of the newspaper to go back to being a family run and edited newspaper.