Dr. Eric Leclerc is associate professor of geography at the University of Rouen (France). He started his research in south India on developmental issues, both in rural areas as well as in small towns. At that stage, a large part of his problematic revolved around internal migrations as indicators of important links between the town and its countryside. After completing his PhD in 1993, he was engaged with the LEDRA (Research Laboratory for Arid and Semi-arid Region) in two collective projects to produce atlases in Mauritania and Mali. This decade in Africa was an opportunity to question the validity of mapping and G.I.S. tools for development activities.These new geographical horizons were the starting point of a comparative approach which was thematically organised around population mobility in societies engaged in very different relations with their territories. After the completion of these atlases, he put human mobility at the center-stage of the process of transforming contemporary societies. Indeed his actual research programme at the Centre de Sciences Humaines (New Delhi) is interrogating a static vision of the Indian society. He is analysing the role of the expatriate Indian communities in our new inner-world space (global scale), as agents in the construction of a world-society.