Professor of Law and Governance at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and currently a Senior Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi. She is the author of Representing India: Ethnic Diversity and the Governance of Public Institutions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Democracy and the State: Welfare, Secularism and Development in Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 1999); and editor/co-editor of, among others, Democracy in India (2nd ed. 2007), Local Governance in India: Decentralisation and Beyond (2005) and The Oxford Companion to Politics in India (forthcoming). Jayal is presently working on a book on the Indian idea of citizenship. Apart from her ongoing preoccupation with issues of democracy, representation and pluralism, she is also currently leading an all-India survey of the quality of participation of elected women representatives in the institutions of local governance in India.