the SIFP has been made possible thanks to two main sources of support.

The Wellcome Trust offered us an initial grant that allowed us to launch the SIFP at the beginning of 1999. This grant was shared among the six initial partner institutions and gave us the means to launch the field operations as well as the establishment of the GIS of South India that proved central to our venture.

 

The French Institute of Pondicherry welcomed the SIFP as a programme within its department of social sciences (headed till 2000 by Christophe Z Guilmoto). It offered also various kinds of support to students affiliated to the programme as well as to other Indian scholars who worked with us. That they managed to almost ruin the project in 2000-2002 is another story...

 

Additional support form the following institutions is also gratefully acknowledged:

The Delhi office of the UNFPA helped two of us to launch the SIPIS project in 2000 by providing us a grant that helped cover the costs of developing the database and the customized software.

 

The IRD (French Research Institute for Development) supported the SIFP right from the beginning. Especially important was the assistance offered at various points by the LPED, a research unit working on population and environment in developing countries based in Marseilles to which the co-ordinator belongs.

 

Among individuals that were most helpful to us, let us thank in particular F. Houllier, S. David, P. Vimard, E. Gérard, M. Vlassoff, S. Vingadassamy, R. Amuda, S. Patel, the team at the department of social sciences (FIP) and more recently JP Muller.

 

Last but not least, the Census of India made all our projects possible by offering to users a new set of computerized disaggregated data. It is and will remain for long the first source of reliable and exhaustive statistics for understanding social and demographic change in India, from the local to the global scale.