In a recent paper, Professor Ian Talbot, a 2018 Mittal Institute Visiting Fellow and Professor at the University of Southampton, delved into the precarious politics of Pakistan’s formative years in the 1950s. Below is an excerpt from the paper; click the link within this post to view the paper in its entirety.
“The pathway from education to employment for Indian youth is, simply put, failing them,” says Vish Srivastava, co-founder of India’s newest employment app, Meet. Alongside co-founder Ankit Chugh, the two have built a platform to address the difficulties that India’s job market presents, with 30% of Indians aged 15-29 either unemployed or not enrolled in an educational institution or skills training program.
Over the Spring semester, Professor Rahul Mehrotra of the Harvard Graduate School of Design challenged his students in an Option Studio to examine the sanitation infrastructure of Mumbai. They were given one ultimate goal: to build a wide-ranging strategy that would upgrade the indigenous settlements of the Koli or fishing community and integrate them into the broader urban system through sanitation infrastructure.
The Mittal Institute engages in interdisciplinary research to advance and deepen the understanding of critical issues in South Asia and the region’s relationship with the world. It holds regular events on issues relating to South Asia; offers fellowships and grants to further the study of the South Asian region; produces research and programs on social, economic, scientific, and political issues in South Asia; and much more. We are seeking a Communications Manager to handle content, communications, press relations, and event outreach in our New Delhi office.
Each year, the Mittal Institute’s Seed for Change competition invites Harvard students to propose projects that can positively impact societal, economic, or environmental issues in India and Pakistan, helping to develop innovation and entrepreneurship in the two countries. This year, a close competition provided grants to one winning team and two runners-up to develop their projects. Riskboard, a runner-up, is an app in development by four Harvard students that will harness online data via social media and open source media data sites to monitor political risk and human rights abuses in India.
At Harvard’s latest Arts First Festival, Mittal Institute student grant recipients Nadyeli Quiroz and John David Wagner unveiled their Living Form sunshade project — an installation that will eventually make its way to a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh.
At the Mittal Institute’s 10th Annual Mahindra Lecture, economist and activist Devaki Jain spoke about India’s post-independence politics and economics, her life and experiences, and the growing feminist movement in India. Check out the podcast from the event here.
Currently in its third year, the Mittal Institute’s Nepal Studies Program — led by Professor Michael Witzel, Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard — continues its work engaging with scholars and practitioners in both Cambridge and Nepal. With each year of the program focusing on a different topic and led by a different faculty member, Witzel has journeyed into an exploration of Hinduism in Nepal and the important role of rituals, from the Vedic period to modern times.
Devaki Jain is an Indian economist and writer who has made significant contributions to feminist economics, social justice, and women’s empowerment in India. In 2006, she was awarded the Padma Bhushan — the third-highest civilian honor from the Government of India — for her contributions to society.
Sarah Khan, a Postgraduate Associate at Yale MacMillan Center, recently visited Harvard to discuss her team’s field experiment in Lahore during the 2018 Pakistan General Elections and their work to understand the gender gap in voter turnout in Pakistan. “The question that we’re interested in as it pertains to Pakistan is: what explains — and relatedly — how can we close the large and persistent gender gap in voter turnout in Pakistan?” Khan asked.
On April 3rd, the India Digital Health Net (IDHN), a multidisciplinary research and development initiative established to support an Application Programming Interface-enabled (API) federated health data architecture in India, convened a workshop in New Delhi to learn from the several initiatives across the country that are building components of what may ultimately become India’s health tech grid. The workshop was organized with support from the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute and the Asia Center. Dr. Satchit Balsari (Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) and Professor Tarun Khanna (Harvard Business School) served as co-chairs of the event.
Are we doing enough to promote science in India? Do we understand its link to the economy? And what needs to be done to promote learning and collaboration in India?
These were some of the questions we set out to answer during our first-ever Annual India Symposium, “Science & Society,” in New Delhi on April 4, 2019. We brought together five panel sessions containing Indian and foreign scientists, government representatives, and industry leaders to discuss, debate, and brainstorm ideas that can advance scientific learning and understanding in India.