Our particular pleasure at the 1998 Seminar has been to welcome a group of participants from six Eastern European countries - a good chance for them to meet other members of the Community and, indeed, to meet each other.

During the year the Trust made a travel award to Oxford University to enable an Eastern European participant to attend a European Conference on Environmental and Societal Changes in Mountain Regions: two delegates from the Czech Republic were able to take up the award and they reported back to us on how helpful the conference had been, and how the award had enabled them to participate.

We have been making a determined effort to get into the modern world here at the Oxfordshire Office and we have succeeded. We now have an e-mail address which is: arkleton@enstoneuk.demon.co.uk

The Trust also runs three internet mailing lists in collaboration with the Arkleton Centre at Aberdeen - all are joined by sending a one-line text message by e-mail of the form: join <listname> <your name> to mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk

The listnames are:

arkleton	a general arkleton list
arktel	a list about rural telecommunications & IT issues
reaper	a list about rural research in Europe.

Please note that mailbase will pick up your e-mail address from the message header and send all messages to that address. If you are going to change your address you must resign from the list before moving.

Not all of the above lists are very active.

Professor Dandekar's death

A sad piece of news since our last Newsletter which, regrettably we are slow to report, was the death of Professor V M Dandekar in July 1995. Vinayak Dandekar was a member of our International Advisory Committee for some twenty years and was one of India's outstanding economists. After his training in statistics at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta he joined the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics in Pune in 1945, and retired there in 1980. He was Director of the Institute for 10 years. In 1970 he set up the Indian School of Political Economy and was founder/editor of its prestigious journal.

Through his writings Dandekar made a lasting impact in the broad area of poverty, unemployment, agriculture and land reforms. His monograph on Poverty in India (1970), jointly written with Nilkantha Rath, was rightly heralded as a pioneering work and remains an important landmark in the field.

Dandekar was an inspiring teacher and a critical and provocative speaker in academic gatherings and public meetings. He enjoyed participating in debates on policy issues and his audience in turn relished his outspoken and sharp interventions which raised the analytical level of debates. Marshalling data and arguments he campaigned for legalisation of cow-slaughter in the midst of a political agitation seeking its ban. As a good debater he presented his views forcefully, even aggressively, but was equally respectful to the ideas of others.

Dandekar will be long remembered not only for his valuable scholarly contributions to the study of Indian political economy but also for his fearless championing of causes dear to him.