Asha Ogale, a M.A. in French with diploma in librarianship, has a long experience in translating Marathi and French to English. After her graduation in 1963, she worked as an intern at the Liverpool Public Library and the Mauritius University Library from 1972 to 1979. In 1981, she was enrolled as a Documentation Officer of Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics (Pune) until her retirement in 1996. From 1983 to 2008 she conducted editorial and translation work for the Centre for Cooperative Research in Social Sciences, in close collaboration with Guy Poitevin and Hema Rairkar.

Asha Ogale passed away on 13 September 2025, at the age of 89. Read her interview on 18 March 2023.

Rajani Khaladkar has been associated for 20 years with the collection, classification and editing of grindmill songs, initially under the supervision of Hema Rairkar. She has a full control of the relational databases of this corpus, and their environment which have been operational since 1998 at the Centre for Cooperative Research in Social Sciences (Pune).

Jitendra Maid was born at Shirur in 1971. He passed his B. Com and completed a course of journalism in Pune University. He has been in contact with the Centre for Cooperative Research in Social Sciences (CCRSS) since 1990. He started helping Hema Rairkar to collect grindmill songs in the Mulshi area, and later other parts of Maharashtra. He also collected myths of Parit, Vadar and Mang communities which were used for socio-economics and cultural analysis of respective communities. Jitendra has been active in the organisation of self-learning workshops under the guidance of Guy Poitevin and Hema Rairkar. He is also involved in the implementation of a network called Jan Hit Vikas Chalval (movement for the development of the benefit for people) over the entire state of Maharashtra.

Bernard Bel, now retired, was a computer scientist at LPL, a speech research laboratory of CNRS and Aix-Marseille University (France). Between 1994 an 1998, he was deputed to Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH, New Delhi) to carry on projects in musicology and social-cultural anthropology. In this context, he set up a collaboration with the Centre for Cooperative Research in Social Sciences (CCRSS, Pune) working on the dynamics of communication in rural India. Together with Guy Poitevin, they brought together scholars and social workers for workshops, three international conferences and a three-volume publication on the theme “Culture, communication and power” (Sage Publications). Later on, he joined Laboratoire Parole et Langage (LPL) and created the Speech Prosody Special Interest Group (SproSIG) under the banner of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). After 2006 he was in charge of the implementation of the Speech & Language Data Repository, a service dedicated to the long-term preservation and sharing of oral and linguistic digital resources. In 2007 he has been elected a member of the Managing Committee of CCRSS under the presidence of Prof. Dhanagre.

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