South Asia

Mumbai

For the past decade the HBS community has demonstrated a strong interest in research related to South Asia. The India Research Center (IRC) was established in 2006 and is based in Mumbai. Following significant economic policy transitions during the early 1990s, India has proven to be a major force within the world economy. As a result, the School supports its faculty with their research interests on the emerging trends that are quickly transforming and shaping the region. To date, the IRC has supported most of the case studies and HBS research projects focused on South Asian business issues, helping to build intellectual capital on this important region. Further, the IRC is home to one of two HBS style classrooms outside of Boston, allowing for regional business leaders to experience our faculty and the hallmark case study method in local Executive Education programs.

Location

India Research Center
c/o Dextrus, 6th Floor,
Peninsula Towers
Peninsula Corporate Park
Lower Parel (West), Mumbai, 400013, India
Tel: +91 22 6108 4017
Fax: +91 22 2490 0724

News & Highlights

OCTOBER 2022
EVENT

boAt Lifestyle Case Study

A case study on boAt Lifestyle by Professor Rajiv Lal, co-authored by the India Research Centre’s Kairavi Dey, was taught in the MBA Required Curriculum in October 2022. The MBA class had the opportunity to interact with boAt’s founders, Aman Gupta and Sameer Mehta, and CEO, Vivek Gambhir (MBA’97). boAt’s marketing strategy, which propelled it from a start-up to one of India’s most prominent lifestyle brands and the world’s fifth-largest wearables brand, has many lessons for leaders around the world.

OCTOBER 2022
EVENTS

Book Tour on the Partition

Research by the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute (LMFSAI), Harvard University, led by Professor Jennifer Leaning, Research Fellow at the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, has culminated into a book titled ’The 1947 Partition of British India: Forced Migration and its Reverberations’. The book, co-edited by Professor Leaning and Shubhangi Bhadada, Mittal Institute Fellow at LMFSAI, is a collection of chapters related to Partition studies. Experts from various disciplines from the three major modern nation-states affected by this cataclysm—Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan—have collaborated for this book. In October 2022, Professor Leaning accompanied by Hitesh Hathi, Executive Director, LMFSAI, toured India, Pakistan, and Dubai. The India Research Center assisted with the book tour and media outreach. An interview with the editors was published in a mainstream English daily column in India.

JUNE 2022
CREATING EMERGING MARKETS

Creating Emerging Markets Interview: Dr. R. A. Mashelkar

The India Research Center organized a Creating Emerging Markets interview with Dr. R. A. Mashelkar, one of India’s most eminent scientists. Mashelkar served for over 11 years as the Director-General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). He was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society, UK, and the first Indian to be elected as a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, US. Mashelkar was interviewed virtually by Professor Tarun Khanna. Mashelkar reflected on his journey from public R&D to corporate India, his mission to preserve India’s traditional knowledge, and the need for government-industry initiatives to drive innovation. Supporting a CEM interview in a hybrid format was a first for the IRC.

JUNE 2022
CREATING EMERGING MARKETS

Creating Emerging Markets Interview: Runa Khan

Runa Khan is Founder and Executive Director of Friendship, an NGO founded in 2002 that supports remote communities in Bangladesh. Friendship pioneered floating hospitals, provides integrated services for climate-impacted communities, and delivers educational services. Friendship has also been active in the Rohingya crisis when Myanmar military persecuted and forced large numbers of Muslims to flee to Bangladesh. It became the second largest healthcare service in refugee camps. This interview begins with Khan describing the privilege she had growing up as a descendent of Jamindars (rich landowners) and tells the story of what prompted her to step outside of her privileged elite lifestyle to address rural poverty. This interview is part of the Creating Emerging Markets project which provides a unique research and teaching resource on business leadership in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East over recent decades.

Archive

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New Research on the Region

January 2023
Case

Digital Transformation at Tata Steel

By: Krishna Palepu, Das Narayandas and Radhika Kak

T.V. Narendran, CEO of Tata Steel, India’s oldest steel manufacturing firm, had taken concrete business and cultural transformation steps to future-ready the firm since taking over in 2013. He had deleveraged and instilled financial discipline, acquired new businesses, entered new segments and adjacent businesses, and launched digital transformation, agility, safety, and sustainability programs. At the heart of his transformation program lay the digitalization drive. Now, he turned his attention to the firm’s burgeoning B2C business. In 2018, the firm had launched an e-commerce platform to sell products directly to retail customers. Now he needed to decide whether to open up this platform to non-Tata group third-party suppliers of ancillary home construction products, like cement, paint, tiles, and other home fittings. Would this create a unique one-stop shop for construction-related goods, or take Tata Steel further away from its core mission? He and his team needed to decide fast.

January 2023
Case

Velong: Rethinking 'Made in China'

By: Krishna G. Palepu, Nancy Hua Dai and Billy Chan

Velong is a supplier of kitchen equipment and backyard grills for major global brands and store brands of large western retailers. In light of the Covid-related disruptions to the global supply chains, and the evolving trade tensions between China and the Western countries, Velong’s global customers were pressuring the company to move 30% of its manufacturing from China to other locations. Velong was considering a number of countries to shift its manufacturing – India, Vietnam, Trukey and Mexico. At present, none of these countries seem to be able to match the cost structure and manufacturing quality that the company is able to achieve in China. Velongs c0-founders, Jacob Rothman and Iven Chen, need to decide soon how to forumlate a strategy to deal with the challenge.