Saturday, September 21, marked Harvard’s first-ever South Asian Convocation, co-hosted by the Mittal Institute and the South Asian Student Association (SAA). This unique celebration of the South Asian community at Harvard attracted over 300 undergraduate and graduate students, as well as affiliates and faculty members.
This summer, the Mittal Institute’s New Delhi office hosted a series of impactful events and visits, fostering intellectual engagement, artistic exploration, and dialogue on critical issues across various fields.
This summer, the Mittal Institute’s New Delhi office hosted a series of impactful events and visits, fostering intellectual engagement, artistic exploration, and dialogue on critical issues across various fields.
The Mittal Institute is excited to announce a new funding opportunity for faculty research on climate change in South Asia in the academic year 2024-2025. Harvard faculty members from any Harvard School are invited to propose impactful climate research projects or interdisciplinary collaboration through workshops that address the critical challenges of climate change in the region.
The Mittal Institute’s CommunityHATS project, funded by Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, was conceptualized as a way to address a major gap in the data related to heat impacts. Often macro-level data on temperature fails to capture the impacts on the most vulnerable, including informal workers who labor in exterior spaces without protection from extreme temperatures. This summer, two members of the CommunityHATS team traveled to Ahmedabad City in Gujarat, India, to work with the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in deploying sensors to collect temperature data from poor working women and their environments. Their work occurred concurrently with one of the most extreme heatwaves India has ever faced.
Anu K. Antony, Mittal Institute Raghunathan Family Fellow 2023-2024, set off to Peru to understand why more and more Syrian Catholic nuns from Kerala travel to South America for mission work. Apart from the ethnographic fieldwork, there was also some downtime for sightseeing and friendly encounters with Peru’s four-legged national symbols. Read her travelogue!
In an op-ed in The Indian Express, members of the Mittal Institute’s climate team + partners working on climate change adaptation in South Asia write on heatwaves and the need for a detailed understanding of how different communities are impacted by and react to the heat.