On April 5, 2019, Professor Tarun Khanna, Director of the Mittal Institute and Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School, traveled to Ashoka University to give a talk to students on meritocracy in India and China.
“I spent an energizing April morning with students and faculty at Ashoka University, one of India’s newer liberal arts universities a couple hours outside of New Delhi. Our conversation unfolded very much like a Gen.Ed class discourse does at Harvard,” Professor Khanna said.
“There was a lot of engaged repartee on what it means to be meritorious in Indian society, whether merit is, in fact, an organizing principle of modern Indian society, and the effects of reservations (a form of affirmative action) in the short- and long-run in India. The ‘Meritocracy in China and India’ project that I co-direct with Professor Michael Szonyi, Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard, provided background material for this session.”