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February 4, 2005|Volume 33, Number 17



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Narayana Murthy, chair of the board and chief mentor of Infosys, one of the companies that have been central to India's boom in information technology, talks with President Richard C. Levin on the grounds of its Bangalore campus.



Yale delegation inaugurates initiatives and forges new ties with India during January trip

President Richard C. Levin met with India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram and other leaders in business, education and government during a week-long visit to India, Jan. 2-8.

The trip was the first official visit by a Yale president to the country where the University's namesake, Elihu Yale, lived and worked for nearly three decades. Yale served the British East India Company between 1670 and 1699 and administered Fort St. George in Madras (today's Chennai, the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu) as its governor between 1687 and 1692. In 1718, Yale donated to the Collegiate School of Connecticut three bales of goods, 417 books, a portrait of King George I and a set of royal arms. Madras cotton, silk and other textiles from India were among the bales of goods and their sale raised 562 English pounds for the construction of the University's first building.

There are currently 99 students from India enrolled in Yale's college and graduate and professional schools -- a total exceeded only by China, Canada and Korea. In Yale College alone, there are 23 students from India.

Levin led a delegation of Yale faculty and administrators to four cities: New Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and Mumbai. Members of the delegation included T.N. Srinivasan, the Samuel C. Park Jr. Professor of Economics and chair of the South Asian Studies Council at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies; Dr. Michael Merson, the Anna M.R. Lauder Professor of Public Health; Shyam Sunder, the James L. Frank Professor of Accounting, Economics and Finance in the School of Management; Kathleen J. Sikkema, associate professor of psychiatry, psychology, and epidemiology and public health; Jane Levin, lecturer and director of undergraduate studies in the Directed Studies Program; Nalini Tarakeshwar, associate research scientist in epidemiology and public health; Philip Long, director of Information Technology Services and the University's chief information officer; and Linda Koch Lorimer, vice president and secretary of the University. The delegation also included Charles Ellis, successor trustee on the Yale Corporation; and Sheila Cook and George Joseph, both assistant secretary of the University in the Office of International Affairs.

"It was an important moment for our visit to India," said Levin. "India is rapidly emerging as a global economic and political power and our students and faculty are increasingly interested in working and studying in the region. We wanted a clearer sense of the opportunities that are here for Yale to engage with Indian institutions."

In addition to exploring possibilities for future academic initiatives and institutional partnerships, the trip also was intended to re-connect the University with Yale alumni and parents in India (of whom there are currently nearly 200) and to advance the University's standing among important audiences in business, education and government. During the trip, three new programs were initiated that signaled Yale's growing presence in India.

During three days in New Delhi, Levin and the delegation held meetings with Singh, Abdul Kalam, U.S. Ambassador to India David Mulford, members of the Indian Parliament and Ministry of Education, and other senior officials of the Indian central government. In these meetings, Levin expressed the University's desire to strengthen its existing relationships with India and to build new ones as the University expands its international presence.

Indian officials noted that while many American educational institutions have taken an interest in India, Yale was one of only a handful of institutions that possess the resources and infrastructure to provide Indian students with need-blind admissions and generous scholarships for undergraduate and graduate study.

Official meetings were only part of the delegation's program for New Delhi. On Jan. 3, nearly 150 alumni and friends of Yale attended a luncheon reception hosted by the Yale Club of India at the India International Center. This was followed by a panel on "Beyond 2020: India in the Global Economy," featuring a conversation on India's economic prospects with Levin, Srinivasan and Rakesh Mohan '71, the secretary of economic affairs in India's Ministry of Finance. The panel highlighted Yale's renowned Department of Economics, where all three studied. (Levin and Srinivasan earned Ph.Ds -- and have been long-time faculty in the department -- and Mohan received his undergraduate degree there.)

That same evening, Levin joined Vice Chancellor G.K. Chadha of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) to inaugurate the Fox International Fellowships there and to deliver a major address on "The Global University" to faculty and students. (See related story.)

Other events in Delhi were designed to better acquaint the Yale delegation with Indian institutions and its educational institutions with Yale. Lorimer and Long led members of the delegation on a visit to the IBM Research Center and the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. Jane Levin hosted a breakfast meeting on undergraduate admissions at which many of Delhi's leading private and public secondary schools were represented. Levin and Lorimer hosted a similar meeting for leaders in higher education.

The Indian media gave extensive coverage to the visit of the Yale delegation. Levin gave more than 20 media interviews, resulting in more than 80 newspaper and magazine articles to date and five television interviews broadcast nationally in India, as well as on South Asian cable stations in the United States.

Yale's billion-dollar commitment to science, medicine and technology and its strengths in engineering and the biomedical sciences, were the focus of the delegation's visit to Bangalore. Levin and members of the delegation visited the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Information Technology-Bangalore (IIIT-B) to explore prospective areas of collaboration with the institutes' faculty and students. While there, Long gave a talk at IIIT-B and spoke in a lecture series to Bangalore's information technology community.

While in Bangalore, the delegation also visited Infosys and Wipro Technologies, two of the companies that have been central to India's boom in information technology over the past decade. Narayana Murthy, chair of the board and chief mentor of Infosys, gave the delegation a personal tour of Infosys' headquarters in Bangalore; at Wipro, Azim Premji, chair and managing director, hosted a luncheon to introduce Levin and the delegation to the academic and business communities in Bangalore.



Azim Premji (left), chair of the board and managing director of Wipro Technologies, introduced President Levin and other members of the Yale delegation to the business and academic communities in Bangalore at a luncheon on Jan. 5. Looking on is T.N. Srinivasan of Yale.


After visiting Bangalore, Levin emphasized the role that science and technology would play in the University's global aspirations. "The importance of scientific and medical discovery to the advancement of the world," noted Levin, "makes attention to these subjects almost a prerequisite for building the best global universities for the future."

The delegation's time in Chennai came only 10 days after a tsumani struck the Indian Ocean region. At a ceremony laying the foundation stone for the new Yale-Great Lakes Institute of Management (GLIM) Center for Management Research (see related story), Lorimer expressed the University's sympathies and deep concerns over the tragic events of the previous week, but also noted that she and others were "greatly heartened to witness the resiliency and the courage of the people of the region." Along with the creation of the Yale-GLIM Center for Management Research, President Levin cut the ribbon to dedicate the offices of Yale Public Health in Chennai. (See related story.)

The trip concluded in Mumbai where the Reserve Bank of India hosted a luncheon in honor of Levin and gave him an opportunity to meet many of the leading industrialists in India such as Mukesh Ambani, chair and managing director of Reliance Industries Limited, India's largest private sector company; Anand Mahindra, managing director of Mahindra & Mahindra; Jamshyd Godrej, managing director of Godrej & Boyce; and others. Lorimer also held meetings with educational leaders in Mumbai.

At the invitation of the Indian Institute of Banking and Finance, Levin delivered the Sir Purshotamdas Thakurdas Memorial Lecture on "Patents in Global Perspective" to a standing-room-only audience of Yale alumni, parents and friends, as well as leaders of the Indian banking community, including the governors of the Reserve Bank of India, State Bank of India and other financial institutions. The talk by Levin, who co-chairs the National Research Council's Committee on Intellectual Property Rights in the Knowledge-Based Economy, was especially timely because India had the previous week adopted a new patent regulatory regime that was required for compliance with the mandates of the World Trade Organization.

On the final day of the delegation's visit to India, the Financial Express newspaper ran an op-ed article titled "Learning from the Yale Example" written by S. Sadagoppan, the director of IIIT-B. In it, Sadagoppan concluded, "If we can transform even one [Indian] institution into a Yale-like university, we can declare that we have 'profited' from the visit by the Yale University president."


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Yale delegation inaugurates initiatives . . . with India during January trip

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