Eight decades of existence and search for an identity: educators perspectives on social work education in contemporary India

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ABSTRACT This article discusses social work educators’ perception of the challenges for social work education in India. Literature on social work education, including the curriculum, practice and pedagogy, provided the framework for the study. The study reported on the results of qualitative interviews conducted with 33 social work educators across five schools of social work located in three metropolitan cities in India ‒ New Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. The study finds that there are four major challenges for social work education in India: (i) the problem of definition; (ii) the lack of a regulatory framework; (iii) diversity among the schools; (iv) the lack of professional identity.