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Renowned economist and historian Amiya Kumar Bagchi was educated at Presidency College, Calcutta, and Trinity College, Cambridge, UK. He has taught and researched at Presidency College, Calcutta; University of Cambridge, UK; Cornell University USA; University of Bristol, UK; Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Paris; Roskilde University, Denmark; and University of Naples, Italy. He has been director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Professor Bagchi has authored Private Investment in India 1900-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 1972), The Political Economy of Underdevelopment (Cambridge University Press, 1982), Public Intervention and Industrial Restructuring in China, India and Republic of Korea (ILO, ARTEP), and a four-volume history of India's oldest and biggest commercial bank, State Bank of India (published by Oxford University Press and Sage). He has edited, among others, the following volumes: (with Nirmala Banerjee) Change and Choice in Indian Industry (1981), New Technology and the Workers'Response (1995), Economy and Organization: Indian Institutions under the Neo-liberal Regime (1999), Democracy and Development (1995), and (with R. Bhargava and RL Sudarshan) Multiculturalism, Liberalism and Democracy (1999).

Barnita Bagchi obtained a BA in English Literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India, and MA from St. Hilda’s College, University of Oxford (where she was a Hewitt Exhibitioner), and a Ph.D. from the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. While at the University of Cambridge, she coordinated the Gender and Literature seminar. Since her college days she has worked actively with feminist institutions and activist organizations, notably at the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, and Majlis, Mumbai. She is also a translator of Bengali literature into English. Currently a member of faculty at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, she teaches and researches a range of issues at the interface of gender, education and development, in contemporary India, early twentieth-century Bengal and Romanatic-era Britain.