The Mittal Institute’s recent panel webinar, “Swaraj: Dadabhai Naoroji and the Birth of Indian Nationalism,” was moderated by Sven Beckert, Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University, in discussion with Dinyar Patel, Assistant Professor at S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research.
“There is nothing as epochal as the cataclysmic event that was visited upon the people of South Asia when decolonization occurred and the British withdrew during the dismantling of the British empire. That forced event — that trauma — continues to shape the lives of two billion of the world’s seven billion people today,” says Professor Tarun Khanna, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School and Director of the Mittal Institute. Despite the abundant historical and political scholarship on the Partition of British India in 1947, there are still gaps in our understanding of the event — and the Mittal Institute’s research team set out to change that.
The Mittal Institute’s recent panel webinar in collaboration with Harvard Business School India Research Center and Harvard Business Publishing, “Science, Business, and Vaccine Development to Combat the Pandemic,” was moderated by Tarun Khanna, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School and Director of the Mittal Institute.
The Mittal Institute’s recent panel webinar, “Educational Responses to COVID-19 in South Asia,” was moderated by Zainab Qureshi, LEAPS Director at Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD), Harvard Kennedy School. Together, the panelists discussed how COVID-19 has shut down traditional education programs throughout South Asia, from primary education to higher education. They highlighted the unique challenges the region is facing in the education sector, such as access to technology and the potential long-term effects of distance learning.
The Mittal Institute’s latest panel webinar, “Entrepreneurs and the COVID-19 Global Reset in South Asia,” was moderated by Tarun Khanna, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School and Director of the Mittal Institute. Together, the panelists delved into the impact of the COVID-19 maelstrom across South Asia on enterprises. They explored the extent to which entrepreneurs have been able to work with both the state and civil society to limit the damage and distress caused by the pandemic, but also to begin exploring new opportunities that a possible “global reset” has opened up to the developing world.
Recently, we spoke with two panelists from our first COVID-19 webinar to answer some of your lingering questions about COVID-19 in South Asia — delving deeper into the impact of public messaging and the lockdown. Dr. Richard Cash is a Senior Lecturer on Global Health in the Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Dr. Srinath Reddy is President of the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI).
Together, they explore improvements to future public messaging about the pandemic, as well as alternatives to lockdown and the social and economic costs of lockdown in South Asia.
The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has saturated our society with massive amounts of data, from location data that measures social distancing efforts to apps, graphs, and charts modeling future trends or helping you assess your symptoms, all accessible at the click of a button. A recent article published in the Harvard Business Review, “Which Covid-19 Data Can You Trust?,” delves into the various technological solutions that have emerged in the face of the pandemic and the potential they pose to provide unreliable information to the populace and policymakers. More than ever, it has become essential to increase engagement between subject-matter experts and decision-makers to manage the reliability of COVID-19-related data moving forward.
The Mittal Institute’s latest panel webinar, “The Science Behind COVID-19,” was moderated by Dr. Jennifer Leaning, Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Together, the panelists provided a deeper understanding of the science behind the COVID-19 virus, exploring the place of science in the COVID-19 response, and new methods of tracking transmission of the virus throughout South Asia through the use of mobile network data.
Last week, the Mittal Institute held a panel webinar, “The Response to COVID-19 in South Asia,” moderated by Dr. Vikram Patel, Pershing Square Professor of Global Health at Harvard Medical School. Together, the panelists discussed the impact of the policy response to COVID-19 on the ground in South Asia, considering whether or not the policies are proportionate and appropriate — and what consequences they might have.
The Mittal Institute team is excited to announce our upcoming Spring Webinar Series! Through webinars that can be accessed around the world via Zoom, we’ll be bringing Harvard faculty and in-region experts into your homes to speak about the latest developments and potential impacts of COVID-19 in South Asia.
Led by Caroline Buckee (Center for Communicable Disease, Harvard T.H. Chan), Satchit Balsari (HMS and HSPH), and Andrew Schroeder (Direct Relief), the COVID-19 Mobility Data Network aims to “provide daily updates to decision-makers at the state and local levels on how well social distancing interventions are working.” The team is made up of a network of infectious disease epidemiologists located at universities around the world.
The Crossroads Emerging Leaders Program began in 2017, a joint effort between the Harvard Business School Club of the GCC, HBS Professors Tarun Khanna and Karim Lakhani, and the Mittal Institute. This year, the Crossroads Emerging Leaders Program received 6,093 total applications from 97 countries spanning the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, Latin America, South Asia, and US students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU).