News & Highlights

  • JANUARY 2026
  • Event

HBS India Gala 2026

The HBS Club of India Gala, held in Mumbai in January 2026, brought together leaders from business, academia, and the HBS alumni community for a day of dialogue on India’s economic future. Anchored around the theme “The Road to $7 Trillion,” the full-day program featured curated sessions examining India’s growth, strategy, innovation, and sustainability. The IRC's 20-year anniversary was celebrated at the gala which was attended by approximately 350 alumni. The program started with a keynote address by Sanjiv Bajaj (MBA 1997). Faculty contributors included Professor Krishna Palepu, Professor Caroline Elkins, Professor Vikram Gandhi, and Professor Ranjay Gulati, alongside several prominent industry leaders. The discussions ranged across financial services, entrepreneurship, healthcare, infrastructure, hospitality, and technology. The IRC partnered closely with the HBS Club of India on content development, speaker curation, media outreach, and on-the-ground execution.
  • DECEMBER 2025
  • GLOBAL ADVISORY BOARD

South Asia Advisory Board Meeting

In December 2025, the India Research Center convened the South Asia Advisory Board (SAAB) in Colombo, Sri Lanka, bringing together board members, faculty, and alumni for a two-day program of dialogue and connection. The convening opened with a welcome dinner hosted by Hussain Akbarally (MBA 2015), offering an informal setting for board members to reconnect and set the tone for the meeting. The following day featured faculty-led discussions on global and regional issues. The program began with a session by Professor Elie Ofek on the “Promises and Perils of AI for Marketing,” followed by a panel on Sri Lanka’s business and economic landscape. Moderated by Hiran Embuldeniya (MBA 2005), the panel included Krishan Balendra, Chairperson of John Keells Group, and Murtaza Jafferjee, CEO of JB Securities Ltd. During the board meeting, Professor Rohit Deshpandé welcomed new members and shared School updates, Executive Director Anjali Raina highlighted recent Center developments, and Prof. Gunnar Trumbull led a discussion on geopolitics and business strategy. The convening concluded with a closing dinner hosted by Nayana Mawilmada (MBA 2005), featuring a presentation by Gunnar based on his book on climate change and business, reinforcing the Center’s role as a forum for leadership and impact across South Asia.
  • NOVEMBER 2025
  • EVENT

Marking 20 Years of the India Research Center with One Harvard

In November 2025, Professor Rohit Deshpandé visited Mumbai and met with the India Research Center team. The team shared updates on ongoing research, center activities, and recent developments at the Center. Prof. Deshpandé offered perspectives and guidance on research and shared updates from the school. The visit concluded with a One Harvard lunch featuring Maharashtrian cuisine, bringing together colleagues from across teams in an informal setting. A cake-cutting ceremony followed to commemorate 20 years of the India Research Center, marking a significant milestone.
  • September 2025
  • Event

Gathering with CLOs and CHROs

The HBS India Research Center (IRC), in partnership with HBS Executive Education and Harvard Business Impact, hosted exclusive gatherings for Chief Learning Officers (CLOs) and Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) in Mumbai on September 23 and in New Delhi on September 25, 2025. These sessions explored the future of learning and leadership through engaging discussions and thought leadership. At both sessions, Sumit Harjani, Managing Director – India and Region Head, Harvard Business Impact Enterprise, shared insights from the 2025 Global Leadership Development Study, sparking discussions on how AI is reshaping learning and leadership capabilities. Senior Harvard representatives engaged with the participants, exchanging perspectives and experiences from across Harvard’s global network. The Delhi session, hosted by Vivek Gambhir (MBA 1997), Venture Partner at Lightspeed and a member of the HBS IRC SAAB, and the Mumbai session, together, convened 19 senior leaders.
  • September 2025
  • Event

Advancing Doctoral Education Through Collaboration

The Harvard Business School India Research Center (HBS IRC) and Harvard Business Impact (HBI) contributed to the Capacity Building Program for Doctoral Educators, held from September 18-20, 2025, in New Delhi. Organized by the All India Management Association (AIMA) and the Association of Indian Universities (AIU), the three-day program brought together educators and academic leaders from across the country to strengthen doctoral supervision and research mentoring practices. Since its establishment, the HBS IRC has been actively engaged in charitable initiatives, with a particular focus on advancing research, academic leadership, and societal impact in the region. Guided by Harvard Business School’s mission to educate leaders who make a difference in the world, HBS IRC and HBI supported scholarly engagement at the program by providing 40 complimentary copies of Beyond Disruption - a book that redefines innovation through non-disruptive creation.
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New Research on the Region

  • 2026
  • Working Paper

Household Preferences for Women’s Employment: A Field Experiment in Bangladesh

By: Yueh-ya Hsu, Reshmaan Hussam, Erin M. Kelley and Gregory Lane

This paper investigates household preferences over who should work, what drives such preferences, and whether these preferences are malleable. We work in the Rohingya refugee camps of Bangladesh, where unemployment is ubiquitous and most women have never worked for pay. First, we document that both men and women exhibit preferences for men’s work. Second, to understand what could drive these preferences, we randomly offer the same six-week job – under identical conditions – to either the husband or the wife within a household. We document asymmetries across partners: when women work, their own psychosocial wellbeing improves, but their husbands’ does not; when men work, both their own and their wives’ wellbeing improve. We then assess the malleability of these preferences using a labor supply exercise that involves an unanticipated offer of an additional week of work. More than one year later, women and men in households where women were previously employed are substantially more likely to prefer that the woman take the new job. They express significantly fewer concerns about women’s employment in general, suggesting that exposure can shift both women’s and men’s preferences by enabling individuals to update their beliefs about an otherwise uncommon experience.

  • 2026
  • Working Paper

Experiential and Social Learning

By: Agha Ali Akram, Gabriella Fleischman, Reshmaan Hussam and Akib Khan

Behavioral change can arise from learning through personal experience or learning from others, but how do these forms of learning interact? We conduct a field experiment on household water chlorination in Pakistan, where a randomized group learns through experience by tracking their children's diarrhea before and after chlorine distribution. Learning-arm households with learning-arm neighbors chlorinate their water at a significantly higher rate for one year after the learning intervention. Their children's health improves by 0.10 SD relative to all other households receiving chlorine. Neither learning households without learning-arm neighbors, nor non-learning households with learning-arm neighbors, exhibit sustained behavioral change.

  • January 2026
  • Article
  • Lancet

The Lancet Commission on a Citizen-centred Health System for India

By: Sandra Albert, Vikram Patel, Anuska Kalita, Kheya Melo Furtado, Nachiket Mor, Shubhangi Bhadada, Tarun Khanna and et al.

India stands at a pivotal moment in its journey towards universal health coverage—a crucial component of the government's Viksit Bharat vision to elevate it to the status of a developed country by 2047, 100 years since its formation as an independent nation. At this juncture, there is unprecedented political will for reform and sustained economic growth, creating a window of opportunity to advance transformative change and for India to leapfrog to a new health-care paradigm: a universal, citizen-centred, and technology-driven system that dissociates affluence from access to high-quality, comprehensive health care. The Lancet Commission on a citizen-centred health system for India was established in December, 2020, to identify the reforms needed to realise this vision. Our analyses are rooted in the lived experiences, expectations, and preferences of the people of India and guided by the principle that they enjoy a universal, fundamental, and inalienable Right to Health, and that the government must be accountable for financing and operating the public sector and stewarding both the public and private sectors. To this end, the Commission engaged a diverse spectrum of expertise and drew systematically upon existing and new research to arrive at our recommendations.

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Anjali Raina
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