Category : India
Oct 26, 2022 | Announcements, Community, In Region, India, News, South Asia in the News
Yamini Aiyar is the President and Chief Executive of the Centre for Policy Research, one of India’s leading public policy think tanks. In 2008, she founded the Accountability Initiative at CPR, which is credited with pioneering one of India’s largest expenditure tracking surveys for elementary education. She is speaking on Rewriting the Grammar of the Education System: Delhi’s Education Reform (A Tale of Creative Resistance and Creative Disruption) at Harvard on Tuesday, November 1 at 5:30pm, and gave the Mittal Institute a preview of her talk.
Oct 19, 2022 | Announcements, In Region, India, News, Students
When Seema Kumari arrived at Harvard last year, she was a long way from home–and not just physically. Her remote village in the Indian state of Jharkhand, near the border with Bangladesh, has just 1,000 people, most of whom are farmers and many of whom are illiterate. Her own parents had little schooling, but her father made ends meet at a local thread factory and pooled expenses with his brothers, sharing a roof with 19 family members. Seema had few paths open to her beyond domestic life–until, one day, when everything changed.
Oct 19, 2022 | Alumni, Announcements, In Region, India, News
For our first Alumni Spotlight, we spoke with the Founder and CEO of SaveLIFE Foundation, Piyush Tewari. His story is one of sheer resilience. Piyush turned tragedy into a relentless quest to save lives on India’s roads, which are some of the most dangerous in the world. India holds the global top spot in road crash fatalities and its crash severity of over 31–denoting the deaths per hundred crashes–is the highest amongst the top 20 countries registering the maximum number of road crashes. He also is the driving force behind the groundbreaking Good Samaritan Law that provides bystanders the safety from legal and procedural hassles in the event that they step up to help road crash victims. Piyush graduated from the Harvard Kennedy School with a Masters in Public Administration in 2017.
Oct 12, 2022 | Announcements, Fellows, In Region, India, News
Sristhee Sethi joins the Mittal Institute as the second class of India Fellows, based at the LMSAI Delhi office. Srishtee studies borderlands and migration, with a focus on the lifeworlds of borderland communities and how ‘border management’ encompasses their...
Oct 5, 2022 | Announcements, Bangladesh, Community, In Region, India, News, Partition, Social Enterprise, South Asia in the News
Tariq Omar Ali received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard and is now an Associate Professor at Georgetown University. His research focuses on nineteenth and twentieth century South Asia and global histories of capital with a particular interest in how the material and everyday lives of ordinary men and women are shaped by transnational circulations of commodities and capital. His first book, A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta was published by Princeton University Press, 2018. He will be presenting his new research examining how decolonization, independence, and the rise of the nation-state restructured the working lives of peasants, boatmen, itinerant traders, and small businessmen in post-colonial East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) in the 1950s and 1960s at the Tufts-Harvard Conference on the 75th Anniversary of Independence and Partition, October 7-9. Prof. Ali will be speaking on Friday, October 7 at 4:30 p.m. on a panel chaired by Prof. Amartya Sen at the ASEAN Auditorium, Cabot Building, Tufts University.
Sep 27, 2022 | Announcements, Faculty, In Region, India, News, Pakistan, Partition, South Asia in the News
Join us for a series of in-country book talks in India, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan The 1947 Partition of British India remains the largest instance of forced migration in recorded human history. Seventy-five years later, the...
Sep 20, 2022 | Announcements, Community, In Region, India, News
The Mittal Institute maintains a presence in countries across South Asia, including India, Pakistan and Nepal. This series of “dispatches from the region” will showcase the ways in which these outposts strengthen engagement, host visiting scholars and...
Sep 14, 2022 | Announcements, Community, In Region, India, News, Social Enterprise, Students
How do societies identify and promote merit? In their new book, Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present, Tarun Khanna (Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, Harvard Business School and Director, LMSAI) and Michael Szonyi (Frank...
May 12, 2022 | Announcements, Faculty, In Region, India, News
Anthony Acciavatti works at the intersection of architecture and the history of science and technology. He is interested in experimental forms of scholarship, pedagogy, and design afforded by humanistic inquiry. His most recent book, Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River (Applied Research & Design, 2015), is the first comprehensive mapping and environmental history of the Ganges River Basin in over half a century. He spent a decade hiking, driving, and boating across the Ganges to map it and to understand the historical conflicts over water for drinking, agriculture, and industry. Combining fieldwork with archival research, the book is an atlas of the enterprise to transform the Ganges into the most hyper-engineered landscape in the world.
Apr 27, 2022 | Announcements, Arts Program, Associates, Graduate Student Associates, In Region, India, News, Students
The Mittal Institute supports Harvard faculty and students as well as in-region scholars with unique opportunities to advance understanding of South Asia. FOR IN-REGION ARTISTS TO COME TO HARVARD Visiting Artist Fellowship – Apply by May 24, 2022 The LMSAI...
Apr 12, 2022 | Announcements, Bangladesh, Faculty, In Region, India, News, Pakistan, Partition
An expert in public health and rights-based responses to humanitarian crises, Dr. Jennifer Leaning has spent her nearly 50-year career at the intersection of war and disaster, atrocities and conflict. Despite witnessing some of the darkest instances of human behavior, it is a ‘kindness of strangers’ motif that motivates her work. She applies this approach to the Mittal Institute’s 1947 Partition Project, which she has led since its inception in 2016.
Apr 6, 2022 | Announcements, In Region, India, News, Social Enterprise
Hemakshi Meghani, co-founder of the Indian School of Democracy (ISD), is a Harvard Kennedy School graduate, where she studied as a World Bank Graduate Scholar. She began her journey as a Teach for India Fellow before working with Boston Consulting Group and two startups in the education and sociopolitical consulting space. Hemakshi is passionate about politics, bottom-up social reform, and making democracy work for every citizen of the country, and she shared some insights into her experience building ISD.
