With the completion of the second summer of the MIT India Program, we begin an occasional newsletter to keep Friends of the Program informed about its current status.

Reversing the Flow

Several friends of MIT India have asked for a simple description of the Program's primary mission. "Reversing the flow" is a slogan that can summarize many of our chief purposes.

For many decades, MIT has welcomed Indian students and professionals. More than 1,000 students have come from India to MIT; they have worked, lived, and learned at MIT, and about half have remained in the United States or other countries outside of India. MIT alumni with Indian roots in the United States are notable for their accomplishments in science, technology and business, just as the 500 MIT alumni who reside in India constitute one of our most distinguished alumni groups in the world. Over the years, the prevailing flow has been from India to MIT. This pattern, of course, is not unique to MIT: the United States as a whole has gained greatly from the influx of Indian scientists, technologists, managers and professionals, who constitute the most educated, influential, and prosperous immigrant group in American history.

Because of the many benefits to the U.S. of this flow of Indians, the traffic to date has been described as a "brain drain for India and a brain gain for the U.S." In fact, of course, there has always been two-way traffic between MIT and India, with MIT faculty joining with Indian colleagues in the creation of Indian institutions like IIM-Calcutta, IIT-Kanpur and the Birla Institute, or working for the Government of India and for Indian private and public institutions. And a recent study of professional movement between Bangalore and Silicon Valley argues persuasively that "brain circulation" not "brain drain" characterizes the two-way movement between these regions.

But no one denies that the greatest traffic has been from India to the U.S. Indeed, one influential MIT alumnus from India, who generously financed the education of many Indian students at MIT, jokingly characterized the return on his investment as "minus 50% for India: half of them stayed in the U.S."

The mission of MIT India is to help reverse the flow by sending Americans to India to experience firsthand the realities of modern Indian industry, science, technology, and culture. We of course are confident that MIT students will contribute to the firms, laboratories, and institutions in India where they work. But our objective is not only to contribute, but to learn, to create a generation of highly qualified Americans who have a "hands-on" understanding of India from having worked there, and who as a result understand intuitively the opportunities and problems of Indian industry, science and technology. In other words, we want to begin to shape a cohort of young Americans who - like Indians who study and work in America - can help build the new bridges urgently needed to join the world's two greatest democracies. Our goal, in a word, is to reverse the flow.

The MIT India Program naturally has other goals as well: to bring India to MIT through activities like the South Asia Forum; to strengthen the MIT faculty in the academic study of South Asia; to create new opportunities for mid-career Indian scientists, professionals and academics to work in MIT's laboratories; to increase the number of Indian students who study at MIT. But all of these goals are related to the central mission of MIT India: to send increasing numbers of well-qualified MIT students and recent graduates to India to work, live, and learn so as to achieve a bicultural professional and personal identity.

Summer Interns, 1999

A total of fifteen MIT interns worked and/or taught in India during the summer of 1999. I visited all of the sites and talked with all of the interns in July, and have been in touch with them and their Indian sponsors since then. Overall, the Program fulfilled the hopes that we and our partners in India had for it. In each site, our partners were eager to repeat or extend the Program in coming years.

Jamshedpur: MIT intern-teachers were received with great warmth and hospitality by their TISCO hosts. Their classes involved 96 students from seven schools, including some from municipal schools and Hindu-medium schools whose students had no previous computer experience. One of the MIT interns, Dev Gandhi, knew enough Hindi to teach the Hindi-medium students, who learned with great rapidity. (Dev was able to move from explaining what a CPU was to teaching HTML in eight weeks.) TISCO managers were amused at what one called "an American student of Indian parents teaching Indian students HTML in ungrammatical Hindi with a strong American accent." The most advanced group from the two Jamshedpur church schools was taught by Sriganesh Lokanathan and Lucia Breierova, who taught advanced HTML and Java with an emphasis on underlying algorithms rather than on the specific programming languages.

Mumbai: Two students worked for ICICI and two for Godrej. The ICICI assignments were at corporate headquarters in downtown Mumbai, and were demanding and extremely interesting to the students. At Godrej, one student worked with Godrej Soaps on an exothermal heat transfer problem in partnership with two IIT-Mumbai students. The second worked with Geometric, the Godrej-affiliated software division, on Cad/Cam problems. A memorable moment was a meeting between MIT intern Andrew Nevins and Prof. Bhattacharyya of IIT-Mumbai, in which they discovered a common interest in machine translation and user interfaces and began a collaboration they hope to expand throughout coming years.

Poona: Four students returned to the Kalmadi Shamrao School, where they worked (as in the previous summer) with ninth and tenth standard students on Internet and Web related topics, and were received with great generosity by the host families in Poona with whom they lived. An especially memorable moment in Poona was an evening reception for members of the Poona community and MIT interns hosted by Mrs. Malathi Kalmadi at the Kalmadi country house, located at a magical site on the shore of a reservoir some kilometers outside of Poona.

Bangalore: Three students worked at Infosys and taught at the Bishop Cotton Boys' School. The School's schedule required interns to leave Infosys each day shortly after lunch, thus diluting their involvement with the culture of one of India's most lively, innovative and successful firms. Next year, we will organize schedules so that interns derive maximum benefit from immersion in the powerful culture of Infosys. Students profited from weekends to visit other South Indian cities like Mysore; some joined a group of interns led by Manas Ratha ('00) that visited Delhi and Agra after their work internships had ended.

In general, interns took advantage of weekends, and of time before and after their work assignments, to travel and explore other aspects of Indian life. They were all integrated into host families or other living arrangements with Indians that gave them an immediate exposure to Indian life. Interns report that they return with greater, more complex and more nuanced understanding of Indian work, industry and life, and a new sense of being "at home" in India.

Coordinator Appointed

Lakshmi Nayak has been appointed Coordinator for the MIT India Program. A political science graduate of Wellesley College, she has worked for the last five years in a variety of capacities for YouthBuild, a non-governmental organization devoted to urban housing for disadvantaged groups. She brings many assets to her new position: wide experience in office work and database management, a lively interest in Indian affairs, a bicultural background derived in part from having lived both in America and in India, and a keen interest in seeing the Program develop. She will have primary responsibility for internship arrangements, and will be housed in the MIT International Science and Technology Initiative (MISTI) office with staff involved in the MIT Japan, MIT Germany, and MIT China Programs. The telephone number for the MIT India Program at the MISTI office is 253-0167; the email address is mit-india@mit.edu.

South Asia Forum To Continue

Dr. Abha Sur will continue the successful South Asia Forum initiated last year. As construction of the MIT India Web site is completed, notice of South Asia Forum activities and other South Asian activities, will be posted there and will be billboarded throughout MIT.

SPAN and Express Computer Articles on MIT India

At the behest of U.S. Ambassador Richard Celeste, Ms. Lea Terhune published an article in SPAN (a publication of the United States Information Service in India) about the MIT India Program. We are grateful to Ambassador Celeste for his interest in the Program. Deepak Kumar, Bangalore Bureau Chief of Express Computer, India's leading computer weekly, published an excellent feature article about MIT India. Copies of both are attached. [please see below]

Plans for Expansion

Champions of the MIT India Program in India and the United States will be seeking additional financial support to permit the expansion of the Program. In the United States, Dr. Ranganath Nayak and Prof. Sanjay Sarma will be seeking support and advice from friends of MIT and India. In India, Messrs. Damodar Ratha and Kavas Petigara, President and Secretary respectively of the MIT Club of India, will be doing the same. Their goal is to obtain funding to continue and expand the summer program, while beginning to add half year or year long internships with leading Indian firms and institutions.

Indian internship partners provide in-country Indian remuneration (if appropriate), room, and board; the MIT India Program supports training, transportation, and supplementary stipends. The additional cost to the MIT India Program of each summer intern is $4,000; of each nine month intern, $20,000. The June, 1999 Progress Report outlines in greater detail the support requirements of the internship program.

South Asia Calendar

One of the responsibilities of the Executive Associate of MIT India will be to assemble a calendar of events involving South Asia on the MIT campus. In addition to the South Asia Forum, events sponsored by SANGAM (the Indian Student Association), SAAS (South Asian American Students), PAKSMIT (Pakistani Students at MIT), the Bangladeshi Student Association, Sri Lankan students, MITHAS (MIT Heritage of the Arts of South Asia) concerts and performances, and others will be included. Other notable events in the Boston area will be listed when possible.

Myron Weiner Dies

As most of you know, Prof. Myron Weiner died at his home in Vermont early this summer. Just before his death, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society, perhaps the highest honor for a social scientist in the United States. No finer tribute to Myron could be made than that published in the Times of India and written by Prof. Ashu Varshney, who was formerly one of his students at MIT. Shortly after Prof. Weiner's death, Jairam Ramesh and other friends and former students in Delhi organized a small memorial meeting; a second commemoration is being planned in Delhi this fall. A copy of the notice in the Times of India is appended to this newsletter.

Acknowledgements and Thanks

MIT India depends on the commitment and generosity of many individuals, both in India and in the United States. Interns in India have been provided room, board, and (when appropriate) in-country salaries by their host firms or schools. Even more important has been the extraordinary personal warmth and hospitality of host families and sponsors. In the United States, the Mustard Seed Foundation, and MISTI (the MIT International Science and Technology Initiative) have helped finance the start-up costs of the Program, partly through funds provided to MISTI by the Starr Foundation for Asian Internships. At MIT, veterans of the first year program in Poona, led by Vinay Pulim (2G), have organized the initial screening of applicants for internships.

For the initial Program in Poona in 1998, we received essential support for airfares from a number of friends in India, in particular: Smt. Akutai Kalyani Charitable Trust, H.K. Firodia Memorial Foundation, "Swagat", KPIT Systems Ltd., Shri Pradeep Rathi, Godrej Soaps Ltd., Peerless Febrikkerne, Mr. Kavas Petigara, and the Sir Ness Wadia Foundation. The Mustard Seed Foundation of Boston provided partial support for training, stipends, and administration. Without their assistance, the first summer Program could not have taken place.

It is not possible to list all of the individuals who have helped the Program in 1999: the following list is only indicative. In Jamshedpur, Dr. Jamshed Irani and Mr. A.S. Dhillon; in Bombay, Messrs. Adi Godrej, Nadir Godrej, Manu Parpia, and K.V. Kamath; in Poona, Mrs. Malathi Kalmadi; in Bangalore, Mr. Narayana Murthy. In each case, these leaders were assisted by "champions" of MIT India who provided the detailed arrangements, job assignments and orientation necessary for the interns. Particularly notable was the work of Mr. Sandeep Raju of Infosys in Bangalore, and of Mrs. Sucheta Deshpande of the Kalmadi Shamrao School in Poona.

In India, the enthusiasm and commitment of Damodar Ratha, President of the MIT Club of India, and the indefatigable, consistent, generous and almost daily involvement of Kavas Petigara, Secretary of the MIT Club, continue to be essential to the vitality of the Program. For their work in the United States in seeking resources to expand the Program, we thank especially Dr. Ranganath Nayak of the Boston Consulting Group and Prof. Sanjay Sarma of the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering.

At MIT, we are indebted to Karl Koster, Bruce Anderson, Ted Korelitz, and Rachel Oberai-Soltz of the Industrial Liaison Program/Office of Corporate Relations; to Lucy Miller, Barbara Stowe and others in the Office of Development; to Dean Philip Khoury of the School of Humanities and Social Science; to Prof. Suzanne Berger and Dr. Patricia Gercik of MISTI; to the members of the faculty Council on MIT India; and to Dr. Abha Sur, who has led the South Asia Forum.

Attachments: Span article; Express Computer article; Times of India obituary. *

Kenneth Keniston

September, 1999

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