Each semester, the Mittal Institute offers grants to Harvard students to further their research, language study, or internship opportunities. For winter 2024-25, 14 students received funding to pursue projects across five countries. Their work spans a wide range of topics, from rethinking urban waste infrastructure in Mumbai, to studying opium economies across empires, to developing AI solutions for disaster response.
As 2024 draws to a close, we reflect on the meaningful research, engaging events, and vibrant community that define the Mittal Institute. To bid the year a proper farewell, we’ve curated a list of our most newsworthy highlights. And as we step into 2025, we do so with a sense of optimism and ambition. Here’s to a year filled with possibility, progress, and purpose.
The Mittal Institute is excited to announce the release of the 2023–24 Year in Review and 2023–24 Arts Program reports. Like every year, the comprehensive Year in Review Report includes updates on all major faculty-led programs, lists awards and fellowships, highlights the work of students, student organizations, and scholars, and summarizes events and other achievements. The Arts Program Report highlights the incredible impact and accomplishments of the Mittal Institute’s various arts initiatives, which include fellowships, exhibitions, and events. Both reports offer valuable insights into the institute’s mission of connecting Harvard with South Asia.
Looking back at the journey of the Seed for Change competition 2022 winner, e-Rehri, exemplifies how bold ideas can create lasting impact. Born from a vision to support informal vendors in Chandigarh, this initiative has grown into a transformative solution for mobility, sustainability, and livelihoods. From its first prototype addressing lockdown challenges to the deployment of an electrified fleet, e-Rehri has become a testament to innovation driven by community needs.
The Mittal Institute’s Visiting Artist Fellowship is a unique opportunity for mid-career visual artists from around South Asia to spend eight weeks on the Harvard campus. The program differs from a typical artist residency program in that it is research-centered, providing artists with the vast resources of Harvard’s intellectual community to enhance their artistic practice. Applications are open until January 9, 2025.
Rinan Shah and Robert Rahman Raman joined as Mittal Institute India Fellows in November 2023. As their fellowships draws to a close, read about their time spent at the institute, including their experiences, contributions, and explorations below.
The Seed for Change (SFC) student grant competition provides up to $30,000 to bold, creative student projects that have the potential for widespread impact in India. Applications are open until February 7, 2025.
Dr. Fatima Zahra, a Mittal Institute Associate, spearheads research at the intersection of human development, labor markets, and artificial intelligence with a focus on the future of learning and work. Several of her projects look at Bangladesh, where she is originally from, including her studies on how climate change impacts child development and what employment barriers Rohingya fathers face in refugee camps. The Mittal Institute spoke with her about her motivation and approach to study climate change in Bangladesh and how socioeconomic and political factors are essential to understanding its impacts.
This year’s Benazir Bhutto Leadership Program Fellow is Waheed Ahmad, the first fellow from Afghanistan. He brings over a decade of experience at the intersection of national security, governance, and development. Waheed most notably served as a senior National Security staff of the Afghanistan Democratic Government (2001-2021). He fled Afghanistan as the U.S. withdrew from the country and the Taliban took power in Kabul. Once in the U.S., he served as Resident Practitioner at the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (I-GMAP) at Binghamton University, focusing on human rights issues in Afghanistan. He is now a Mason Fellow pursuing his MC/MPA at the Harvard Kennedy School. We spoke to Waheed about his past, his time at Harvard, and his future plans.
This winter, three Harvard Law School students will be the inaugural cohort of interns with a judge of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, based in Islamabad, Pakistan, through a new program facilitated by the Mittal Institute called the HLS J-Term Clinical Internship. Through this internship, students will get an opportunity to attend the court proceedings at the Supreme Court, prepare bench memorandums, conduct legal research, draft opinions, assist the Honorable Justice on complex cross-cutting legal issues, and contribute to the overall functioning of the Chambers.
In 1970, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) was hit by a cyclone that killed 300,000 to 500,000 people. Prof. Mushfiq Mobarak, Yale University, and Prof. Sultan Mehmood, New Economic School of Moscow, provide empirical evidence that the cyclone’s devastation and the Pakistani government’s “callous response” to it were instrumental in galvanizing support for an independence movement. The two authors share their work in this Q+A ahead of a November 15 Joint Seminar on South Asian Politics.
In an essay for the 1800 Histories project based at the Harvard Center for History and Economics, which explores the local conditions at key sites that play a disproportionate role in methane emissions, WIEGO founder and Mittal Institute Steering Committee member Martha Chen writes about the impact waste pickers have on methane emissions in Delhi, India.
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