Destination India ; in a $12 Million Plan Spurred by Its Stalwart Faculty and Aided by Star Alumni, Harvard Is Reaching Out to Indians As Extensively As It Is Educating Americans About One of the World's Most Significant Economies

Summary

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In 1974, when Anand Mahindra, vice-chairman and managing director, Mahindra and Mahindra, was at Harvard, studying art and photography, he remembers tuning in to the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and hearing about India testing a nuclear weapon. "I remember the woman sitting next to me saying, I thought India couldn't feed her hungry." Cut to recently when he returned from a meeting of the Harvard Business School (HBS) and one of the board members, the CEO of a large corporation, leaned across to him in the bus and said, "How come all Indians are so smart?" In 1989, when Vikram Gandhi, managing director and global head of the Financial Institutions Group at Credit Suisse in New York, was at HBS, he was an oddity in a class of 800. "There were a handful of Indian professors and I was the only guy from India with a funny accent," recalls Gandhi. Now 15 per cent of the faculty is Indian and 38 of the 900 students who joined this year are from India or are of Indian origin. For the two men, the connection with the 371-year- old university, the oldest and richest in the US, has become stronger since they graduated. Both are part of the seven-member Founders Club, which has pledged $11 million (Rs 43 crore) to Harvard's South Asia Initiative (SAI), a university-wide entity charged with setting Harvard's academic agenda, funding student and faculty research, and optimising activities across various schools. The initiative was announced last week by Harvard's new president, historian Drew Gilpin Faust.

It's an initiative that caps the university's inexorable mission to win India, towards which it has committed $1 million (Rs 3.9 crore) in the initial stage. It also recognises, says Mahindra, India's importance on the world stage. In January, the Kennedy School of Government launched an executive education programme for senior members of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), developed in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, which expects to train 360 senior IAS officers over a three-year period. This summer, Harvard and the Tata Group funded 57 undergraduate and graduate students in the US to go to India to study or participate in internships, a huge increase from three students three years ago. The Harvard School of Public Health has collaborated with the Government of India and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to form the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) while the HBS-funded India Research Centre (IRC) in Mumbai has contributed to over 40 research projects and cases about Indian companies.

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Destination India ; in a $12 Million Plan Spurred by Its Stalwart Faculty and Aided by Star Alumni, Harvard Is Reaching Out to Indians As Extensively As It Is Educating Americans About One of the World's Most Significant Economies

It is an extraordinary confluence of alumni initiative and university interest, the result of 11 months of intensive consultations across Harvard with leaders around the world, and similar to the university's Japan and China programmes, funded by their large corporations. The importance the institute attaches to the initiative is reflected in the...

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