Social Change
Social Change is a peer-reviewed quarterly journal of social science and development published in New Delhi by SAGE Publications in association with the Council for Social Development. Continuously published since 1971 — it celebrated its golden jubilee in 2021 — it provides a forum for discussion of social change and development in as non-technical language as possible, an editorial commitment that has shaped its character for over fifty years. It carries print ISSN 0049-0857 and online ISSN 0976-3538, is indexed in Scopus and UGC CARE, and is classified across development, geography and planning, sociology and political science. Edited from the Council for Social Development, it is one of the longest-running Indian journals dedicated to the study of how Indian society changes, and who benefits from that change.
Founded in 1971 With the Council for Social Development
The journal began in 1971 as the journal of the Council for Social Development, the New Delhi research institution in association with which SAGE still publishes it. Its full historic title — Social Change: Journal of the Council for Social Development — records that identity. The Council is a social science research body concerned with development policy and social welfare, and the journal was created as its public-facing scholarly forum: a place where research on India's development experience could be debated beyond the specialist seminar. Reference works record the journal's history simply as 1971 to the present, and Scopus coverage listings run from 1971 through to the current year, confirming the unbroken span behind the golden jubilee that the journal marked in 2021, when fifty years of its education writing were substantial enough to be republished as a book-length collection in SAGE's Social Change in Contemporary India series.
A Forum in Non-Technical Language
The journal's best-known editorial principle is its language policy: discussion of social change and development is to be conducted in as non-technical language as possible. That is a deliberate democratic choice for a social science journal. Development research in India concerns administrators, social workers, teachers, journalists and activists as much as professors, and a journal that requires every contribution to be legible beyond its own discipline widens the circle of who can use research. Peer review still applies — Social Change is a refereed, peer-reviewed title — but accessibility is treated as a scholarly virtue rather than a concession. The principle helps explain the journal's longevity in institutional libraries and its presence in reading lists across sociology, political science, development studies and education.
Scope: Development and the Social Sciences
Social Change covers the field its name announces: social change and development, approached across the social sciences. Bibliometric classifications place it in development, geography, planning and development, social sciences generally, and sociology and political science. In practice its pages have carried sustained debates on the subjects that define India's development trajectory: public health and the politics of health care, education policy and practice, poverty and welfare, planning and public policy, and the social consequences of economic reform. A documented example of its health coverage is its 2013 examination of universal health care and neoliberal policy, written from the Council for Social Development itself, alongside evidence-based studies of public-private partnerships in health planning — work that locates health systems within the larger shift from welfare-oriented to market-oriented development that the journal has tracked since the reforms of the 1990s.
Theme Issues and Five Decades of Record
A signature method of the journal is the theme-based issue: specific themed numbers capture major social and economic changes and mass movements in India in the post-Independence period, concentrating specialists on a single development question. The value of that archive became visible at the golden jubilee, when papers and articles on education published in Social Change over five decades were collected into the 2021 volume Education in India: Policy and Practice, introduced by Manoranjan Mohanty — a former editor associated with the journal — with an introduction by education scholar Jandhyala B. G. Tilak highlighting the shifts in education policy across seventy years, including the shrinking of social sector expenditure after the 1991 liberalisation. Few journals can document a policy field across fifty years from their own pages; that Social Change could do so for education demonstrates the depth of its themed archive.
Editors and Editorial Office
Current reference listings name Riaz Ahmad as editor, with Anakshi Pal as managing editor, Susmita Mitra as book review editor and Gurmeet Kaur as assistant editor. Earlier listings associate Manoranjan Mohanty, the political scientist long connected with the Council for Social Development, with the journal's editorship, including in its SAGE series activity around the golden jubilee. The presence of a dedicated book review editor is a small but telling detail: reviewing new scholarship is treated as a standing function of the journal, keeping readers oriented in a fast-expanding development literature. The editorial office remains that of the Council in New Delhi, while production, distribution and the online archive are handled through SAGE Publications India.
Abstracting, Indexing and Metrics
Social Change is abstracted and indexed in a wide range of services: DeepDyve, Dutch-KB, EBSCO, J-Gate, OCLC, the Indian Citation Index, Portico, ProQuest's Worldwide Political Science Abstracts and Sociological Abstracts, and Scopus. It is also UGC CARE listed, making it a recognised outlet for Indian academic assessment. Its bibliographic identifiers include LCCN 72921675 and OCLC number 1608049, reflecting its presence in library systems worldwide since the 1970s. Bibliometric summaries place it in the third quartile of its subject categories, with an h-index recorded between 18 and 20 in recent listings and Scopus CiteScore figures published for the title — modest metrics by the standards of large international journals, but attached to a title whose influence runs substantially through Indian policy and teaching communities rather than through citation counts alone.
Publishing Arrangements With SAGE
The journal is published quarterly by SAGE Publications in association with the Council for Social Development — a partnership pattern common to India's institute journals, in which the owning institution retains editorial identity while SAGE provides peer review infrastructure, production, international subscription sales and the digital archive, including a noted June 2024 special issue and full online back-file access through the SAGE platform. Copyright in individual articles is recorded to the Council, as in its 2013 health issue, where articles are marked as Council for Social Development material published by SAGE across its international offices. For authors, the arrangement offers the visibility of a global publisher's platform for work that remains anchored in an Indian research institution's agenda.
Readership: Scholars, Policymakers and Practitioners
The journal's non-technical language policy defines its readership as much as its subject does. Alongside sociologists, political scientists and development researchers, it addresses the policy community in New Delhi — planners, administrators and analysts in the institutions around the Council — and development practitioners who need research findings in usable form. Its classification under geography, planning and development as well as sociology reflects that mixed audience. Teachers form another significant constituency, as the golden jubilee education volume shows: five decades of the journal's education articles were considered a resource substantial enough for classroom and policy readers to warrant a standalone book. A journal that can be read by a district-level practitioner and cited by a university researcher is performing the bridging role its founders intended.
Social Change and India's Development Debate
The journal's fifty-year run coincides almost exactly with the modern history of Indian development policy: the planning era of the 1970s, the debates on poverty and basic needs, the 1991 turn to liberalisation and the subsequent arguments over social sector spending, inclusive growth and welfare rights. Social Change provided a continuous forum through all of it, in a period when its introduction to the jubilee education volume could describe mass movements and major economic changes in post-Independence India as the journal's recurring raw material. Its critical stance on the marketisation of public services, visible in its health coverage, and its attention to education as a public good, place it in the tradition of Indian social science that evaluates development by its effects on the least advantaged — the evaluative standpoint of the Council for Social Development itself.
Standing After the Golden Jubilee
More than fifty years after its 1971 founding, Social Change continues quarterly from New Delhi, peer-reviewed, Scopus- and CARE-indexed, and identified by ISSNs 0049-0857 and 0976-3538 in library and citation systems worldwide. Its endurance rests on a clear formula that has not needed to change: an institutional home devoted to development research, a publisher providing global reach, theme issues that build a cumulative archive on India's great policy questions, and a language policy that keeps scholarship open to the practitioners and citizens development is supposed to serve. For readers tracing how India has changed — and how Indians have argued about that change — it remains one of the essential journals of record.
