The primary task of CSD Hyderabad is to provide a platform for researchers to engage in socially relevant research and disseminate such works that focus on core themes such as sustainable development, intersections of marginality, democracy, representation and social justice. Sustainability and inclusion remain the common threads that weave the research we are engaged in as researchers belonging to different disciplines of social sciences such as economics, political science, anthropology, regional studies and sociology. CSD promotes interdisciplinary research, international collaborations and exchanges and action oriented academic engagements. Through such collaborations in the form of research projects, conferences, workshops, lecture series, training programmes on data mining, research methods and publications (working papers, journal articles, books, newspaper articles), CSD fosters academic debates.
The broad areas of research conducted at CSD from 1968 have been health, literacy, education, social security, the situation of women and children, disability welfare, access to credit and skill development, cooperatives in different sectors, migrant labour and social welfare & planning.
The current research concerns at CSD focus on the pandemic and its impact on livelihoods, labour markets and barriers; environmental economics (focusing on mining, displacement, mining closure, social impact assessment, urban forestry and common property resources); access to health and education, intellectual property as a community right (with special focus on geographical indications), political participation and representation of marginalised communities (covering a range of legal framework such as panchayati raj institutions, user associations such as watershed management, forest rights and displacement); with gender, social location and disability (as a cross cutting lens of marginality) in most of the research we undertake.