Praveen Rai is an Academic Secretary at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi, a premier institute in social science research and humanities in India, funded by Indian Council of Social Science Research. His key areas of research interests are: election studies with a special focus on states of Haryana and Chhattisgarh, participation of Indian women in electoral politics and media monitoring. Before his present assignment, he worked as a Project Manager at Lokniti, where he handled more than 50 election studies and opinion polls and was actively involved right from the stage of designing the surveys till final dissemination of processed data in the public domain. His writings have been published in Indian academic journals, mostly in the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW). His seminal work, Electoral Participation of Women in India: Key Determinants and Barriers, was published as a special article in the January 2011 issue of EPW. He used content analysis as a research tool to ascertain and analyze the media coverage of women's issues in mainline newspapers in 2002. Based on this study, he wrote a book called Women in Press--Still Invisible in association with the German foundation, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES), India office in 2003.
