Harvard South Asia Institute Blog

Updates from the Harvard South Asia Institute (SAI). Interested in contributing? Email [email protected]. More about SAI: southasiainstitute.harvard.edu. Please note: The views expressed in these posts belong to the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the South Asia Institute.

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Student voices: Achievement gaps in state-regulated Madrasas in Bangladesh

By Zayan Faiyad, Harvard College ’18

Faiyad conducted field research during winter session to identify root causes of achievement gap in state-regulated Madrasas in Bangladesh

In Bangladesh, 13.8% of total primary school and over 20% of total secondary school enrollment are in Islamic schools, popularly known as Madrasas. An overwhelming majority of Madrasas are in rural areas, comprise primarily of students coming from low income families and are known to have a persistent achievement gap. Over winter session, I conducted interviews in several state regulated schools (Aliya Madrasa) across 3 districts: Dhaka (2 schools), Mymensingh (3 schools) and Chandpur (7 schools). I conducted interviews with 2 officials from the Madrasa Education Board in Dhaka, Madrasa administrators (mostly school principal or next point of contact), teachers and students.  

Experience with interviews: Although we had received prior commitment from 13 Madrasas allowing us to visit and speak with stakeholders, 1 male-only Madrasa denied our request to enter. The only admin official present in the premises said that that he was not informed about our arrival and the principal (our contact) was unreachable by phone. Other institutions were relatively welcoming. Some institutions had pre-designated which teachers we could speak to while others allowed us to interview any and all teachers. About half, generously allowed me to sit in classes and follow the lessons. Administrator and teacher responses varied in openness: most answered our questions with sufficient details, some sounded more guarded in their response and a few asked us what we hope to do with their answers.

In the first few schools, we held focus groups within the school premises with students selected by the teachers. We realized that we were not getting many responses: some students were shy and others did not want to identify any shortcomings due to trust issues, (i.e. if we were trustworthy or how responses might be perceived by their peers). Therefore, we changed our method and selected individuals or groups of friends to speak to us as they were leaving classes. That exhibited some improvement in the responses that we were getting.

MAIN INSIGHTS:

Government regulations both a boon and a burden: Contrary to my previous understanding, state regulated Madrasas were not entirely funded in the categories of expenses designated under the Madrasa Education Board. For example, although teachers at state regulated Madrasas are supposed to be on government payroll and registered in a government MPO registry, only a handful are actually MPO registered and receive state funding. The rest of the teachers are paid by the institutions’ fund, creating a huge disparity in the pay of teachers within an institution that leads to stratification within the teaching staff and lower morale for non-MPO teachers.

If a Madrasa would like to be eligible for state funding, they have to teach the state designed curriculum and have to commit to following certain state recommendations. The government provides books free of cost for adopting the standardized curriculum but the cost of stationary, classroom furniture, upkeep of premises are often paid for by the school. While coming under government regulation reduces some of the financial uncertainty faced by previously autonomous schools that were dependent on donations, they also impose certain extra administrative costs. For example, state regulations require that the maximum class size has to be 40 students. So, some institutions have to open another section if they exceed the limit by even 5 people while not having enough teachers to service both classes. Sometimes teachers have to cut down total instruction time to be able to teach both sections.

The state provides funds allocated for miscellaneous administrative costs but often these schools do not receive them in practice. Some administrators complained that they can only pick up the checks from the local government offices if they provide a hefty bribe to the officials. Sometimes, there is no check to be picked up. Once a school becomes state regulated, donors automatically become less likely to donate to the school assuming they have adequate funds. Therefore, traditional methods of fundraising become less available for these schools and some have introduced tiered school fee systems to cope (no school fees charged previously).

Same learning challenges, different cultural challenges: Many of these schools face the same challenges as most under-resourced schools: some teacher absenteeism, low teacher morale, student absenteeism, etc. However, there are also some unique challenges.

Strong religious sentiments are at odds with the more secular undercurrents of the state designed curriculum. Some administrators openly expressed sentiments that they feel their religious identity is under attack from anti-Islamic, pro-modern, pro-globalization forces. As such, some teachers may disagree with certain aspects of the curriculum and may not be willing to teach students those lessons. Other teachers feel stretched thin and expressed dissatisfaction with having to teach subjects that they have no training in. It is important to note that many of these teachers are products of the previously non-regulated Madrasa system that focused excessively on religious education and many start their jobs with no prior teaching experience or training.

The stratification among teachers is not the only form of discrimination prevalent in the system. Teachers seemed to have knowledge about the financial background of students and often discriminate based on that knowledge, providing less attention to students with high financial need. Madrasas almost always have a boarding option for students, unlike mainstream schools. There is also discrimination between day and boarding students, provided that most boarding students come from families which are unable to support their children and relegate the responsibility to these institutions. Discriminatory behavior from teachers and administrators seem to impact the attitudes of the students themselves; day school students start to bully boarding students, who seem to suffer from self-esteem issues that could be impacting their learning outcomes.

To summarize, Aliya Madrasas face financial constraints that have not been mitigated by coming under state regulation, while learning outcomes have been kept low by a combination of resource constraint and socioeconomic disparity.

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Student voices: Tiger reserves and nature preserves

By Mei Yin Wu, Harvard College ’17

This wintersession I interned with the Wildlife Conservation Trust as a fellow working in the economics division. Having had traveled a fair bit, I was surprised to find Mumbai a beast of its own. During the first couple of days in the city, I was overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of people and traffic. Mumbai is one of the ten most densely populated cities in the world (8 of which are in the Indian subcontinent). Due to the enormous size of the population, there is a large demand for motor vehicles, which inevitably contributes to higher levels of particulate matter in the air. Issues such as air pollution and water sanitation safety, however, are by no means unique to India. Most developing countries face these problems and in fact, most developed countries have experienced these issues in the past. But generally with consistently high growth rates, like the ones India has recently enjoyed, comes increased expectations of standards of life. I believe that India will face increasing pressure to combat the environmental issues that seem inherent to the process of economic development.

Despite the initial discomfort that came from adapting to new traffic patterns and air quality, I grew to appreciate the abundant diversity of Mumbai. Being a financial hub, Mumbai attracts people from all over India and as such, is home to many diverse cuisines and religious practices. I was able to sample Southern Indian street food at Matunga and “sizzlers,” Chinese Indian fusion dishes, in Nariman Point. According to my peer fellow, Pooja, people celebrate all religious holidays in Mumbai. In her circle of friends, her Muslim friends would invite her over for Eid, and she would return the favor when it came time for Diwali. Many people I spoke to seemed to disbelieve the claim of religious differences being the primary factor behind Indian-Pakistani conflict and instead viewed the conflict as a matter of politics. While the conversations I had were by no means necessarily indicative of popular opinion, it was interesting to hear local perspectives as a supplement to the views posited by Western professors.

I was interning at the Wildlife Conservation Trust, which currently works in over 110 national parks and sanctuaries of India, covering tiger reserves and nature preserves. In India 3.5 million people live within tiger reserves and several hundred million inhabit the nature preserves. Due to the inseparability of humans and the natural environment, WCT has realized that one cannot take an isolationist approach towards conservation and as such, it seeks to promote conservation and community development in tandem. WCT’s initiatives have two goals: economic empowerment and minimization of environmental degradation. During my time in Mumbai, I became familiarized with the different levels of wildlife protection granted by the government as well as about how WCT has evolved from an entity that grants donations to causes, to a stand alone non-profit with formal programs. One such initiative employs and trains communities living on tiger reserves to be part of the forest guard force. Forest guards are necessary to mitigate human wildlife conflict, as well as to protect wildlife from poaching.

Sunset at Nariman Point

Prior to my arrival, WCT had conducted surveys to collect general information from these communities. After initial data wrangling and exploring descriptive statistics from a dataset of 360 respondents in the Greater Tadoba Landscape, I gained insight into energy consumption and crop patterns. I determined that 90% of the sample population used firewood as their primary source of energy, with 93% of these firewood consumers collecting their own firewood. This initially seemed unsurprising given that firewood is freely available for extraction in the forest and has been traditionally the primary means of attaining energy. However, recently, liquefied petroleum gas, or LPG, has been offered at no cost to these households through government subsidization, which causes one to wonder why residents still opt to devote time and energy to collecting firewood. This behavior is worth noting on the environmental front, because burning firewood for energy not only emits pollutants, but also exacerbates deforestation. Understanding this behavior can be useful for thinking of new methods to incentivize shifting towards alternative energy sources. Also interesting to note is the fact that 70% of respondents report damages to their crops due to animal interference, with only 7% receiving compensation from the government. All of those receiving compensation report an insufficient level of compensation. Additionally, 12% of respondents report cattle loss, of which 84% blame tiger activities. These are all issues to consider when further considering how to maintain a mutually sustainable environment for human and animal communities. I am still in the process of examining additional data collected regarding health metrics of forest guards. This is important because forest guards suffering from poor health may have difficulty meeting certain performance levels, such as failing to complete their daily surveillance route. We believe that finding the most efficacious ways of optimizing the health of the forest task force would lead to greater gains in conservation efforts.

This internship opportunity not only allowed me to learn a lot about the intersection of economic empowerment and conserving animal populations, but also about the context in which work is conducted in India. For example, while I was familiar with high bureaucratic hurdles such as permit applications, I was surprised to learn of extensive institutionalized corruption embedded in daily life. I also realized that India, compared to the U.S., has a drastically different set of resources and priorities. On my first day at the office, I overheard a conversation during which someone said: a policy that does not impact at least a million people is a not policy worth talking about. Due to the size of the Indian population, problems are tackled from a different angle: the activation energy for implementation is much higher. Policies and initiatives, compared to those in the U.S., must affect a relatively higher population to merit pursuing. I am grateful for not only new perspectives into a very interesting interdisciplinary field, but also a new network of warm and helpful colleagues at WCT. I look forward to continue collaborating and learning with my WCT family in the future.

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A fruitful trip to India

By Naren Tallapragada, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Francesco Wiedemann, MIT

Tallapragada and Wiedemann were winners of SAI’s inaugural 2016 Seed for Change Competition for gomango, which provides low-cost refrigerated transport to food producers in India. Since the spring, they have been working to implement their idea on the ground in India.

In December 2016 we visited India to start building our business (gomango) enabled by a Seed for Change grant from the South Asia Institute. On our trip we met players in food, retail, and logistics across the country who were excited by our vision to make cold chains in India affordable and sustainable. Our journey took us from the fish docks of Mumbai and food factories of Aurangabad to the wholesale markets of Delhi and office parks of Bangalore. Along the way we tested our technology and gained valuable insight into the psychology of Indian consumers and corporations.

As the inaugural winners of the Seed for Change competition and active members of the entrepreneurial ecosystem at Harvard, we have been able to take our venture further and faster. By sharing our learnings and our progress in this post and ones that follow, we hope to give back to the community that has supported us so generously.

Nothing you read or watch on TV can prepare you for the reality of being in India. As a German coming to India for the first time in his life, Francesco had an eye-opening experience. In his own words: “It was amazing to see how big the differences really are between the developed and developing world. In India cars and pedestrians follow no rules. A political procession can cause an hours-long traffic jam. The sky in many cities is choked by smog, an indicator of India’s tremendous economic growth and the profound environmental problems that accompany it.  Yet for all of its challenges India is one of the world’s friendliest and most hospitable societies. Though I looked like an outsider I never felt like one. I was impressed by how even casual acquaintances were willing to connect us with their old friends and business partners – of course, stuffing us with food before we left any meeting!”

Speaking of food – we set off for India to test many of the assumptions and hypotheses underlying our business plan. First and foremost was the headline number we have always used to make a case for our vision: 40% of food in India spoils on its way from farm to market. We confirmed this number with supermarket chains, distributors, food brands, and retail experts. However, we learned that in India spoiled food is not necessarily wasted food. There is a secondary market or use for most damaged and expired goods that would go to waste in the West, in part because food safety standards are lightly enforced.

We saw this parallel market in action at the Ohkla sabzi mandi in Delhi. One seller we met had many grades of tomatoes on offer. He sells fresh, red “grade A” tomatoes to supermarkets and kirana stores, while partly green “grade B” tomatoes go to hotels and restaurants that use them to prepare meals. But even his spoiled tomatoes have a buyer. When we asked this seller what he does with his food “waste,” he showed us another crate hidden under a table at his stall. In this crate we could see (and smell) mushy, runny, rotten tomatoes. To our (unpleasant) surprise the seller told us that street food vendors buy these tomatoes at bargain-basement prices and use them in soups, sauces, and gravies.

We did not expect that anyone derived value from waste that we had considered worthless. But they do. We had to see India for ourselves to turn the business plan we wrote in Cambridge into a plan of action that could work in Chennai. As the saying goes, “in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.”

SAI Seed for Change Competition (Deadline to apply: Feb. 15, 2017)

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Student voices: The Politics of Knowledge

By Joshua Ehrlich, PhD Candidate, Department of History

A summer research grant from the South Asia Institute took me recently to a handful of archives across the UK: three in Scotland and one in London. The research was primarily in English and Indo-Persian source materials connected with my dissertation, “The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge.” These materials ranged from the mundane to the mystical; from the collections and correspondence of administrators to the poems and petitions of scholars. My project aims to give a new account of the political and ideological uses of knowledge in South Asia, in the eventful decades around 1800. Such materials are its evidentiary bread and butter.

At the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, I consulted the papers of George Bogle, who was commissioned in 1774 to establish a trade route between Bengal, Bhutan, and Tibet. The mission was not only commercial, but diplomatic and scholarly in character: Bogle was tasked with assessing the “government, revenue, and manners” of the places he visited. At Mount Stuart, on the Isle of Bute, meanwhile, I looked at several collections connected with the Company’s administration and education policy in the early 1800s, including correspondence between past and contemporary governors-general. The University of Glasgow and Royal Asiatic Society in London held other papers of interest in understanding the complex interactions of ideology, patronage, and scholarship.

One of the intellectual challenges of a transmarine project like mine is to trace the often forgotten connections between distant peoples, languages, and political idioms. But the archival work required to do so also entails physical and logistical challenges. Splitting the past year between India and the UK, travelling around most of the time in each, I was rarely able to adjust to a given place—or even fully move out of a suitcase. The British summer this year was sunnier than normal, but still made for an incongruous backdrop to some of my researches. It takes a greater-than-normal effort of the imagination to travel from a manor house library on a Scottish island to a desert outpost in the Deccan. Of course, London, and to a lesser extent Glasgow, have sizeable populations of South Asian ancestry, with attendant cultural and culinary benefits. Spend enough time in Delhi, however, and you become something of a snob about chole batura or Mughal miniatures. (The same goes for Kolkata and mishti doi etc.).

One of the best cures I found for my “culture shock”—or, as I’ve started calling it, “latitude sickness”—was a visit to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. Linked from the time of my research to gardens at Calcutta, Saharanpur, and elsewhere across the British empire, Kew feels somehow more tangibly global than the nearby City of London, a cultural void whose myriad overseas financial connections are obscured by their complexity and ethereality. In the humid enclosure of an antique greenhouse, as the sweat came to my skin, an unlikely argument came to my mind around the disparate sources I had spent the summer consulting. I rushed “home” to write it down.

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Student voices: Jousting over Jurisdiction

By Priyasha Saksena, SJD Candidate, Harvard Law School

In my doctoral dissertation, I am interested in unpacking the relationship between international law and empire. The existence of empires in a world of international law has always been a bit of a puzzle, since international law is supposed to be based on ideas of equality, sovereignty and justice. Some scholars argue that the existence of empires was an aberration in an otherwise equal world, an aberration corrected by the process of decolonization. Others argue that empires were central to the creation of modern international law, and particularly the concept of sovereignty, which is, therefore, encoded with ideas of civilizational difference. In my dissertation, I examine debates around the legal status of the princely states of colonial South Asia (entities that were not under British rule, but not wholly independent either) to suggest that the idea of sovereignty was a site of social and political struggle between the British and the South Asians. To support this claim, I focus on jurisdictional disputes between the princely states and the British empire to trace arguments made by British and South Asian lawyers, civil servants, administrators and intellectuals on ideas of sovereignty.

Thanks to the generous support of the South Asia Institute, I spent the summer archive hopping in India, gathering a range of material on a variety of issues. In 2015-16, I had spent some time conducting archival research in the Asian and African Studies collections at the British Library in London (which house the India Office Records), and had found material on British official arguments and responses in the sovereignty debates. This summer, I planned to back up my prior research with material from Indian archives to supplement my analysis on the arguments made by South Asians, by looking at petitions and letters sent by Indian princes and their officials, internal documents of the Chamber of Princes, and private papers of a number of influential civil servants who served in the princely states.

In New Delhi, I spent time both at the National Archives of India and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. At the National Archives, I focused on material relating to three main issues – jurisdiction over European British subjects in the princely states, submissions and opinions on the Butler Committee (that had been set up to opine on the legal status of the princely states), and submissions and opinions on the proposed federation between British India and the princely states (a venture that ultimately failed to come to fruition). I found extensive notes prepared and submitted by various princely states (including Patiala, Bhopal, Mysore, Travancore and Baroda) on all three issues. At Nehru Memorial, I focused on the private papers of Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru (a British Indian lawyer who frequently advised a number of the princely states) and Sir Mirza Ismail (the diwan of Mysore and Hyderabad). However, my most interesting find was a collection titled “Federal Papers,” a set of two volumes that contained documents intended for private circulation among the members of the Chamber of Princes. They included a number of legal opinions and reports of various sub-committees set up by the Chamber of Princes on the proposed federation, and provide a valuable insight into the manner in which the princes and their advisers conceptualized sovereignty and their arguments on the legal status of the princely states.

I also spent time at the regional office of the National Archives of India in Bhopal. Although much of their material relates to the erstwhile Bhopal State, they also have a section on the Chamber of Princes on account of the chancellorship of the erstwhile Nawab of Bhopal. The Bhopal office is not a heavily visited one; as the Assistant Director of the Archives told me, they have a significant amount of untapped information in their records. Their holdings did not disappoint; I found them to be a rich source of memos and opinions (mainly for private and internal circulation) by advisers to the princely states on their legal and constitutional status, particularly with reference to the position of the princely states in relation to federation. Archival work can sometimes be dispiriting since it involves a lot of time spent digging around, often with little to show for results. But, as I saw time and again this summer, nothing can quite match the thrill of stumbling across a century-old document filled with often-juicy details of a disputed claim of a princely state, and the numerous legal arguments deployed by princely state advisers in support of their clients. Much of the material in my dissertation is based on such findings, and I am grateful to the South Asia Institute for supporting my work.

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SAI hosts artists Komal Shahid Khan and Meenakshi Sengupta

From November 29 – December 9, the South Asia Institute hosted two artists from South Asia as part of its Visiting Artist Program. Komal Shahid Khan, from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Meenakshi Sengupta, from Kolkata, India, spent their time at Harvard attending classes, meeting with students and faculty, giving a public seminar, and had the opportunity to display their work on campus.

They visited courses such as ‘History and Sexuality in the Modern West’ taught by Nancy Cott, ‘Politics of Gender Inequality’ taught by Ana Catalano Weeks, FAS, ‘Gender and the Making of Modern South Asia’ and ‘Leaning in, Hooking up: Visions of Feminism and Femininity in the 21st Century’ taught by Phyllis Thompson. They visited the Harvard Art Museums and several other art institutions in the area.

“We experienced a lot. Visiting the museums and seeing the original works there, that means a lot to me,” Sengupta said.

During their time, the two artists collaborated on an interactive performance piece about the Partition of India, an idea that formed when they met in Cambridge. (Video above).

“We had these preconceived ideas: She’s from Pakistan, and I’m from India. There is an unconscious boundary between she and me. But we can not feel it while we are sharing our experience at Harvard. But there is something that divides us,” Sengupta said.

Both artists said the experience was extremely enriching for their own work, and valued the opportunity to show their art to a new audience. “We are addressing common issues, but there are cultural differences. I loved the artist talks and discussions about our practice. Seeing how people from a different part of world react to their work – it’s valuable,” Sengupta said

“Coming together and deciding new things, planning new projects, you get more motivated and enthusiastic to start on new projects when you go back to your country,” Khan said.

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Student voices: My Sanskrit journey in Pune

An after-school walk on Parvati Hill with verdant view and cooling breeze.

By Lee Ling Ting, PhD, FAS 2021

The generous funding from Harvard University South Asia Institute allowed me to visit India for the first time. In the summer, I was enrolled in an eight-week Sanskrit Program at the American Institute of Indian Studies in Pune.

As a child growing up in Malaysia, my first impression of “India” came from the Tamilian serial dramas with jolly dance scene, and the mouth-watering roti canai, which was easily available in most hawker centers. As I started learning Sanskrit several years ago, I began to be deeply immersed in a whole new “Indian” world ornamented by intricate beauty; I was deeply fascinated by the complex of Sanskrit grammar—with all kinds of conjugation and declension— and the figures of speech employed in Sanskrit poetry. My mind ran wild as I read Sanskrit plays and stories with imaginative plots and scintillating wit. With this Indian images constructed by some childhood memories and reading of Sanskrit texts, I was looking forward to finding out two things in the summer: India as it is today and Sanskrit texts as interpreted and approached in the Indian traditions. I embarked, feeling nervous and excited, on my Sanskrit journey in Pune.

An old Mosque in the rainy season in Tulsi Baug, Pune

The first ten days were rough. Accompanied by the lack of internet and mobile number to get in touch with my family was the pain of a cold that defeated me both physically and mentally. Worried about missing classes, I was feeble but restless. But I knew I got to help myself out of this undesirable state of being. I made the decision to get to know my host parents and my surroundings well, such that I can feel connected to them and my well-being be sustained by them; I am still thankful to this decision as it later helped to improve the quality of my stay in India significantly.

School work at AIIS was heavy, but manageable and enjoyable. Rarely had I any chance in the past to read Sanskrit for so many hours everyday, let alone reading Kālidasa’s depiction of the monsoon season while experiencing the monsoon myself. Waking up every morning in the sound of Sanskrit prayers broadcasted on the radio, I immediately felt myself in that very world. On the bumpy rickshaw to school everyday I mumbled my paradigms or read my text, while observing the Devanāgari script which was everywhere on the street. (Just by the daily exposure to the script, I felt much more comfortable reading it.) More memorization of paradigms, speaking of Sanskrit, and reading of texts were done at AIIS, until I felt myself exhausted in noon and could not wait to devour the whole thali of Indian food carefully prepared by the cook and his wife in the canteen. The direct contact with the weather, the flora and fauna, and the people helped me to make sense of the world in Sanskrit texts and enriched my understanding of them.

While classes at AIIS provided me with formal Sanskrit education, things took place outside the classroom gave me the nuances required to admire Sanskrit texts and Indian culture in general. Concerts in Indian classical music taught me how the different rasas are when actualized through sound and how a violin can be played in a radically different way, i.e. held upside down (see photo). The wedding rituals I was fortunate enough to witness gave me a taste of Indian society and kinship relation. The chromatic Indian clothing cultivated another kind of aesthetic sense in me. The daily conversation with my host parents made me realize how many similarities we share in our cultures. At the end of the eight weeks, I brought away with me a self, whose horizon was broadened by the place and the people, not to mention the language skills that were acquired through the training. I am grateful for the valuable experience I had in the summer.

With my host mom

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Student voices: Teaching history through empathy

By Asad Liaqat, Doctoral candidate, Public Policy PhD program, Harvard Kennedy School; SAI Graduate Associate

This summer I worked with “The History Project” (THP) in Lahore, Pakistan to develop an evaluation strategy for an exciting set of workshops they are doing with school children. These workshops are aimed at improving critical thinking and increasing empathy in schoolchildren in Pakistan and India. As a researcher, my role in these workshops is to design an evaluation strategy to ascertain the impact of these workshops on critical thinking and empathy in children.

The workshops in themselves are borne out of THP’s previous work in schools in India and Pakistan, introducing children to the idea that there is multiplicity in historical narratives. They decided to place versions of the same incidents from Indian and Pakistani textbooks right next to each other and simply show that to students, taking in their reactions and learning how the rigid notions of right and wrong formed due to particular forms of socialization in formative years could be broken. Having gone through that development phase, THP was ready to start piloting its workshops this summer, and I formed a partnership with them to evaluate the impact of their interventions.

In designing such an evaluation, there are a host of theoretical and practical issues that differ from a standard evaluation of a development program – a setting I am more used to. Firstly, the outcomes that we are trying to impact are by definition vaguely defined and hard to grasp even conceptually. I spent a lot time grappling with the concept of critical thinking and empathy, as understood by psychologists, educationalists and behavioral economists – and trying to square these theoretical constructs with how these ideas were being applied by THP in their pilot workshops.

Our current working definition of critical thinking is very close to what Robert Ennis describes as “reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do.”[1] The three core features of this definition we hope to teach students in our intervention are (1) identifying conclusions, reasons and assumptions; (2) judging the quality of an argument, including the acceptability of its reasons, assumptions and evidence; (3)  defining terms in a way appropriate for the context. The predominant examination system in Pakistan is based on rote learning, where passing the exam is more considered more important than learning the content. Moreover, students are discouraged to question their curriculum. This produces intolerant adults later on who were never brought up in an education system that fosters a multiple perceptive approach of forming beliefs. Our intervention does not push any particular interpretation of historical and societal narratives onto the children. Instead, it gives students the methodologies to question and approach them in a more critical manner without calling either side wrong. It also takes students on a journey to showcase their own histories and social identities that are made up of various narratives without asking them to believe in a certain side of the story. This approach, which does not take ownership of the truth or tries to push any particular ideology onto the children has been welcomed by schools.

In conceptualizing empathy, we consider two levels at which empathy operates: cognitive empathy and affective empathy. Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand what the other feels; to see a situation from another’s perspective. Cognitive empathy, however, does not imply any degree of concern about the other. The notion of affective empathy involves actually caring about the other side; the person who has affective empathy for another is moved to help the other. In the language of economics, cognitive empathy enters into a theoretical model in the form of an individual’s beliefs about the other’s beliefs whereas affective empathy directly enters the individual’s utility function.

These abstract concepts translate into THP’s workshop through a series of interactive activities that are very different from the usual lecture-based classroom setting the children are used to. One activity I particularly like is an ‘attribute linking’ activity. Each student is given a pencil and post-it notes. They are asked a series of questions of the form “Who in this classroom comes to school in the same kind of vehicle as you?” or “Who is this classroom is the smartest?”. After each question is asked, they are asked to identify someone who matches the description given in the question, write the adjective i.e. the subject of the question on a post-it and stick it to the back of the student that they thought fit the criteria. For instance, if the class is looking for the shortest student in the room, each student posts a note saying ‘shortest’ on the back of the student that they think is the shortest. This activity helps student focus on the subconscious choices about familiarity and ‘other’ that they make on a daily basis. The activity begins with helping them focus on similarities and differences and then thinking through their process of making friends or ‘othering’ their peers. In our experience, it gets students to think about the meaning of discrimination and how it is at play even when we think that it is not.

Another activity that gets at the inconsistencies in which majorities and minorities are treated in both Pakistan and India is a short cricket game that is held as part of the workshop. If a session has twenty students, two teams are made, one of which consists of only 4 players and the other of 16 students. They are asked to play the game with normal rules, and the trainer does commentary. When, as would be expected, the team with 4 players start performing badly, the trainer ignores the numbers in their commentary and instead speaks about how wonderfully the winning team is playing and vice-versa. At the end of this game, students are asked to talk about how they felt during the game. Inevitably, the unfairness of the setup comes up in discussion and the trainer then links that to real world situations in which either minority status or other social barriers prevent certain groups from performing at par with those with advantages, but there is no acknowledgement of these disadvantages. The hope is that this activity translates into cognitive empathy towards minorities and those from a lower socioeconomic background.

The task of measuring changes in empathy and cognitive thinking remains challenging. I have developed an evaluation strategy using a mix of stated measures from established reliable psychology scales, some established behavioral measures used previously such as the dictator and some original behavioral measures that have not been tried before and are designed by me particularly for this context. The process of piloting these behavioral measures remains challenging, and the hope is to fine tune both these measures and the intervention itself with time. We are currently in the process of obtaining funding for pilots and a scale-up, and another practical difficulty we face in this process is the escalating tension between India and Pakistan. Donors seem reluctant to fund activities explicitly talking about relations between India and Pakistan. Unfortunate as that is, we believe our framing goes beyond the particularities of the history of India and Pakistan, and so we are currently in the process of developing case studies from the history of apartheid in South Africa to illustrate many of the same points.

[1] Ennis, Robert H. Critical Thinking Assessment, Theory into Practice, The Ohio State University, Vol 32, No. 3, 1993.

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Student voices: Underground banking in Myanmar

By Jasmine Chia, Harvard College ‘18

This summer, I traveled to Myanmar and was able to do three things: learn Burmese reading and writing, change my thesis topic to a more suitable and interesting topic, and finally to make Burmese friends and connections. My initial objective in going to Myanmar was to research the Vipassana movement, with the intention of going to various temples that practiced this meditative form of Buddhism and interviewing participants to understand how the movement towards Vipassana Buddhism may be linked to political engagement. This was to be a comparative piece comparing Vipassana Buddhism in Myanmar to the Buddhism of the Thammakaya sect in Thailand, which also preached a form of Buddhism modernism that emphasized an individualist experience of enlightenment over a communal form of religious engagement. However, through a series of serendipitous events, I stumbled on a much more interesting phenomenon in Myanmar in explaining the links between capitalist religion and political engagement.

When I initially got to Myanmar, I was lucky enough that my timing coincided with the beginning of one of the most well reputed Burmese courses taught in Yangon, Bama Zaga by John OKell and Yu Yu Khin. For the first two weeks of the summer I immersed myself intensely in these language classes, spending every day at the French Institute studying Burmese and making sure that I did the homework so I would consolidate my knowledge. At the end of two weeks I was able to read comfortably and pronounce difficult Burmese words, as well as write my name and converse in very basic Burmese. This was immensely helpful, not in conducting my research but in making connections with Burmese people. At the institute, I was also surrounded by many researchers and NGO workers working in interesting fields, and in speaking with them I was able to increase my understanding of Myanmar’s political issues and how best to conduct research in the country. Whilst the Rohingya issue was not the paramount political issue in Myanmar that international media makes it out to be, it was certainly sensitive to talk to people about religion, especially with regards to politics.

As I finished the language class and began meeting up with contacts in Myanmar to begin my research, by chance I was connected with someone working at Myanmar’s biggest bank, KBZ Bank. I went to speak with him about Myanmar’s banking sector in general, and as we discussed the challenges of creating the trust required for people to transition from a cash economy to a credit economy, he told me about a fascinating phenomenon that was a big challenge for modernizing the country: the Hundi system. The Hundi system is an informal, underground system of monetary transfer that allows for the many international Burmese migrants to send their money home. Developed under the socialist military regime when economic activity was discouraged and people had to risk their lives to cross the border, the system allows payments to be made by an agent in a distant location and the difference to be settled between the agents later on. Even as bank remittance options– such as those offered by KBZ or AYA – became available and legal, the simplicity and flexibility of the Hundi system means that it remains a key challenge for banks to overcome.

To me, this was reminiscent of James Scott’s thesis on how Myanmar’s harsh geography – the aggressively hilly regions to the north contrasting starkly with the floodplains to the center/South – has shaped the politics of the region, creating different state identities and also allowing a space for rebels to shape a stronghold in opposition to the center. To some extent, this geography has facilitated the civil war that remains ongoing amidst Myanmar’s peace talks, and it is this geography – and this lack of trust in the state – that determines the success of the Hundi system. The idea of geography as a determinant for Myanmar’s political and economic future, mitigated and understood through the Hundi system, seemed to me a perfect pivot for my thesis topic.

As this was already halfway through my summer, I had to seek out secondary sources to understand the context of the Hundi system. I was able to access libraries at the Yangon University as well as resources from researchers in the area, and especially crucial was meeting Dr Toe Hla and interviewing him on money lending practices in Myanmar. He gave me insight into the origins of the money lending system and was able to speak generally to the relationship between money lending and political cronyism, as well as access to capital and growth of political power. Moreover, I was able to interview John Buchanan, who writes about the economy of Myanmar in the 21st century, and he recommended Sean Turnell’s Fiery Dragons, which seems to be the only piece of literature I’ve found in English with a section devoted to the Hundi system.

Whilst the lack of secondary literature has made studying Hundi more difficult, it also means that this is an area where primary research is crucial, and the SAI grant allowed me to directly interview people and understand firsthand how the Hundi system works. I spent the rest of the summer shadowing the man at KBZ bank and doing research for him on marketing techniques to overcome the Hundi system (or to act as a complement to it) and was given access to a lot of resources through this connection as well.

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Student Voices: Resilient Design to Resilient Buildings: Quality Assurance in Nepal’s Remote Mountains

By Justin Henceroth, MDes Risk and Resilience, 2017, Harvard Graduate School of Design

There is little machinery available in remote parts of Nepal, so many construction tasks are done by hand, including bending rebar.

The SUV slowed to a crawl as we prepared to cross the last of four causeways before we reached our destination—a construction site for a new police station in Dang District, Nepal. This site is not in the most remote part of Nepal, but in many ways this construction site embodies the challenges of building anything in this mountainous country. Despite being on the national East-West Highway, it took us nearly six hours to drive the 120 miles from the nearest city and the regional headquarters for UNOPS, the organization managing this project. It had not rained in over a week, so the road was clear, but the evidence of landslides lined the road for miles, and each causeway we crossed was still under a few inches of water. It was easy to understand how even a day of rain could quickly block some key section of this road—cutting off access between communities and the flows of people and materials.

As the reconstruction following last year’s earthquakes gets underway throughout Nepal, the limited access will prove a significant challenge for the communities, government agencies, humanitarian organizations, and donors that are all working to rebuild Nepal. Throughout the country, more than half a million homes need to be rebuilt, more than 30,000 classrooms have collapsed, and more than 400 health centers were completely destroyed. Many of the most damaged communities are in the remote hills that flank the Himalayas, with some villages accessible only by a multi-day walk.

A two-story school used to stand at this site in Sindupalchowk District. Most of the walls collapsed and the frame was damaged in the earthquake. What was left of the structure was demolished to prepare for a new school.

The scale and remoteness of the reconstruction has implications beyond the logistics challenges of moving people and materials. To facilitate the reconstruction, many new organizations are getting involved in building projects, bringing in key additional resources, but often lacking the technical expertise and experience to ensure quality construction projects. On top of that, resources devoted to quality assurance across all types of projects are far less than what is needed to ensure regular and timely oversight. As a result, it is likely that many projects will be built without adequate oversight or review to assess quality.

This is a particular challenge for a reconstruction that is being undertaken through a “Build Back Better” methodology. Across all sectors, organizations are committing to not only rebuilding, but to rebuilding new structures that possess key design and structural elements that will make them more resilient in the case of future earthquakes—a possibility many seismologists warn may occur soon. However, even if organizations are designing projects that contain key earthquake resilience measures, if these elements are not included in the building during construction, that building will be just as vulnerable as the ones that collapsed before it. With a tendency for local contractors to revert to known construction techniques, there is a real concern that without adequate quality assurance, all design for “building back better” may never be realized in the field.

In Nepal, these concerns are not only arising from the reconstruction, but are substantiated by past experience. One major international donor has been working on school construction in Nepal since 1994 and has built over 9,500 classrooms. Design drawings for schools built through these projects show key earthquake resilience measures; however, after more than 2,000 classrooms collapsed during the earthquakes, reviews of those sites revealed that many of the key design elements were not included during the construction process. During construction of those schools, contractors had omitted elements to save money, engineers had signed off on approvals without proper review, and communities were not empowered to review or report on potentially faulty construction.

Photos from a field visit in Navilprasi District. People in the photo include community members, contractors, project engineers, project managers, the donor, and me (red shirt third from right).

While arising now in Nepal, these challenges have long plagued development and humanitarian efforts; however, recent developments have opened up new opportunities. In the past few years, mobile networks have expanded across the globe, with even remote mountainous countries like Nepal and Afghanistan boasting 90% mobile penetration. At the same time, new and more powerful mobile phones and tablets are able to carry out more advanced and complex tasks.

Taking advantage of these developments, I am working with UNOPS and the Nepal Innovation Lab to develop a new platform that will allow organizations engaged in humanitarian and development projects to use mobile technologies to conduct quality assurance projects on remote sites. This platform will include a mobile application that will prompt field users—including supervisors, contractors, and communities—to collect and provide data about progress on construction sites, while also providing them with key education materials about resilient design techniques. Data collected in the field will be submitted to a central location, where project engineers and project managers using a web application can review, provide feedback back to sites, and, if significant issues arise, communicate with or visit problem areas. This will not only provide more information to organizations implementing projects so they can ensure quality throughout the process, but will also enable them to better target limited resources to working with field sites to ensure that they are using the best available construction methods.

We are currently in the process of developing the software, standards, and educational materials to create this platform. Over the course of the coming months, we will release prototypes for field-testing, focusing first on school construction projects in earthquake affected districts in Nepal and expanding outward to other projects as we are able. By the beginning of 2017, a full version of the platform will be complete, and we will focus on expanding its use across the reconstruction process in Nepal. The expanded use of this platform has the potential to improve construction processes, increase accountability, and promote transparency in reconstruction, development, and humanitarian aid.

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Student Voices: Women and mental illness

By Angela Leocata, Harvard College ’18

Angela interned at Sangath in Goa, India over the summer to research community-based intervention for maternal depression

As an SAI grant recipient, I had the opportunity to return to Goa, India to continue research I began the previous summer with Sangath, an NGO and mental health research institution. Awarded the MacArthur Foundation’s International Prize in 2008 and a pioneer of task-sharing for mental healthcare to primary care and community workers, Sangath is one of the most influential health non-profit organizations, globally. The organization is co-founded by Vikram Patel, a world-renowned research psychiatrist, Professor of International Mental Health and Trust Senior Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and 2015 recipient of Time Magazine’s “The Most Influential 100 People in the World.”

As a returning intern, I analyzed the data gathered as a product of the sub-study I helped to develop last summer. The study evaluates the impact and experience of an intervention wherein mothers are trained as peer-counselors to support other mothers with postpartum depression. While programs too frequently view women’s health as reproductive health and mental health as a Western experience, mental illness was the leading cause of global years lived with disability in both low- and high-income countries in 2004, and women share a disproportionate burden of suffering. Around the world, women predominate in rates of common mental disorders, such as depression and anxiety. This disproportion can be better understood through the social, economic, and political context in which gender and mental health disparities arise, as well as the forces that prevent access to care. The findings of this study will have powerful implications for increasing availability and access to mental healthcare for women, globally.

Unlike last summer, in which I focused mostly on the impact of the program on the mothers, this summer I began to consider its impact on the peer counselors. By supporting the counseling team, I was able to reflect on how the intervention may not only have an impact on the mothers with postpartum depression – whom the intervention is delivered to – but the delivery agents themselves. Given that the peer counselors are also mothers, and that the intervention asks them to process and share their own experiences of motherhood, I became interested in whether they, too, are affected by the intervention. This inquiry has accumulated into my thesis question, which will be integrated into the larger study. In considering the community health worker experience, I will consider a group of people central to the dissemination of mental health programs, but rarely considered in mental health literature. I view this inquiry as significant not only for this specific intervention, but for the dissemination of mental health interventions, globally.

Returning to Goa and continuing with my research from last summer shook what I thought I understood of task-sharing and global mental health. The continuation of work with the same community enabled me to consider new inquiries and ask questions I hadn’t previously imagined. By shifting now to the community health worker experience, I am able to engage with a local issue that has global implications and ask questions applicable to an ongoing practice. I intend to continue with combined coursework in Medical Anthropology, Clinical Psychology, and Global Health and Health Policy to develop my understanding of both maternal mental health and community health worker experience before continuing with fieldwork this January. I am eager to return to Goa to delve further into new questions in a context I hold a deep commitment to, and contribute to a field I consider to be both a personal passion and global need.

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Student voices: Beef bans in India

This is part of a series in which we share reports from Harvard students who have traveled to South Asia with support from a SAI grant.

By Shaiba Rather, Harvard College ’17

This summer, thanks to the generous grant from the South Asia Institute (SAI), I was able to pursue my thesis research at both Cambridge University and Delhi, India. My thesis project is to investigate the status of burgeoning bans on the production and consumption of beef in India. In this investigation, I would like to examine the issue contemporarily from three primary angles: campaign rhetoric, legislation, and communal violence. Specifically, I will focus on campaign rhetoric in the six months leading to the 2014 Lok Sabha General Elections, recent amendments to cow slaughter legislation in India, and notable cases of communal violence in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh and Una, Gujurat.

For example, the 2014 Lok Sabha General Election began with the lines ”Modi ko matdan, gai ko jeevadan, BJP ka sandesh, bachegi gai, bachega desh.” Only two years ago, these lines coupled with images of the Mata Gau served as some of the ruling party’s salient slogans during parliamentary elections. Some would argue that the words translated into legal ramifications. Despite spite discourse on beef legality since the Partition, Prime Minister Modi has done what no other politician before him had accomplished—banned beef production and consumption in 24 of the 29 states in India. Laws have been intensified, and in some cases, the consumption of beef went criminalized. Even communal violence that started in Western Uttar Pradesh against Muslims expanded to violence against Dalits, a low caste of Hindus often in the leather trade, in the PM’s home state of Gujurat.

Though an episodic topic of discussion since the nation’s conception in 1947, the status of beef bans is interesting today for two reasons: first, the unprecedented magnitude of bans across state lines, and second, the way in which cow slaughter has occupied central discourse in India, from heated Parliament debates to the Prime Minister begging cow vigilante groups to “shoot [him] and not [his] Dalit brothers.” Why, then, are these bans taking off in India now when this debate has existed since the days of Partition? To what extent has cow vigilantism changed the debate on cow slaughter today? I will examine these central questions in my thesis research.

SAI’s funding allowed me to split my research into two primary stages: first, in Cambridge University and then, in Delhi, India. The funds from SAI went mostly towards accommodation rentals and train transportation in India. I found that SAI in conjunction with the grant from the Harvard College Research Program were able to well accommodate my financial needs for the summer.

My time with Cambridge’s Centre for South Asian Studies allowed me to get a historical analysis of the debate in India. I used the post-partition archives, especially those of the reputed Times of India,as well as documents of the Constituent Assembly Debates. I found that the discourse in the past primarily surrounded cow protection and not beef consumption as opposed today. Rationale for the movement was presented as agro-economic, given the importance of the cow for husbandry. I learned that the cow and the pig became common ways to surely ignite communal tensions. Cow carcasses were left outside Hindu temples and pigs blood often scattered Muslim mosques. The cow was clearly an emotive issue through Indian history and following my work with Cambridge’s Center for South Asian Studies, I was extremely excited to begin my interviews in Delhi for a more contemporary perspective.

In Delhi, I interviewed 35 people, a mix of politicians, academics, and journalists to determine what kind of discourse was happening at the national level. Perspectives ranged from as far left as India’s Communist Party to the far right section of Hindutva fundamentalists. My questions originally focused on election tactics and whether or not the cow should be protected. As I proceeded with my interviews, I found that these were not the best questions to ask. The Una incident—which involved the flogging of Dalits by cow vigilantes—turned public discourse in the direction of those who take the law into their own hands. Given that Una happened only a week before my arrival in Delhi, I found that the primary debate in India was not whether or not the cow should be protected but instead how civilians were interpreting the law. Thus, my interview questions explored how certain government ideology emboldened vigilante groups and the current state to which justice delivery systems were effective in India. I found that almost all politicians recognized the importance of the cow for Indian society, but rather than present the importance in an agriculture sense they spoke in terms of respecting Hindu sentiment alone. Many politicians criticized India for not being a Constitutionally minded society and commented on how we were witnessing current lawlessness in the name of the cow because of a failure of state law and order systems and a hunt for local power. Interestingly enough, despite Indian languages having no equivalent for the word ‘secularism,’ I found that nearly all politicians had a consistent understanding of the purpose and role of secularism in the unique Indian context.

Though the research is specific to India, the findings will be of comparative interest to scholars studying the communal politics of food and community conflict. The research will more generally explore how government ideology and can embolden fringe elements and impact the perception of law and order in a state. In this way, the research questions are both theoretically interesting to social scientists as well as critically important to political parties who play with identity politics to mobilize the vote bank. Ultimately, this topic contributes to a larger question of how identity politics are mobilized in multicultural democracies and how legal framework of a country can be affected if those politics get out of hand.

My summer was exciting and challenging at the same time. I found that the subject of beef was very sensitive for Indians, especially in the given political climate. That being said, it was very difficult to get party members of the ruling government to speak to me. Language barriers at times were also very difficult to overcome. I encountered a number of politicians who spoke a very sanskritized, high register Hindi that was out of my heritage Urdu speaking comfort. Also very challenging was the speed at which the debate was evolving in India. From the incident in Una to the PM’s Independence Day speech, the situation on the ground required me to constantly keep up to date on current events and recent statements made by politicians. All in all, it was amazing to see Delhi in a new light, this time not just as a place of personal and cultural interest but now one of academic intrigue as well. I am very grateful to the South Asia Institute’s continued support for my project. My thesis research would not have been possible without their encouragement and financial backing.

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Student voices: Researching History Textbooks in Sri Lanka

This is part of a series in which we share reports from Harvard students who have traveled to South Asia with support from a SAI grant.

By Sarani Jayawardena, Harvard College ’17

A history textbook is a complex item, lying at the intersection between ethnic politics and education policy. I did not think about that as a student in school – then, the history textbook was something to read, memorize, and cough back up at end-of-year examinations. But when governments write curricula or textbooks, the history textbook starts to mean much more. It becomes a tool by which the state can transmit its historical narrative, its version of the official past of a country. It becomes a direct articulation of what the state considers an accurate narrative and a desirable national identity for its citizens.

Yet “national history” is subjective: differences in identity – whether by race, religion, language, social status, class, or gender– can drastically alter personal conceptions of history. Thus multi-ethnic countries face a multiplicity of versions of past and conceptions of identity. Many South Asian nations have witnessed ‘textbook controversies’ or ‘textbook wars’ because of this complexity.

Some of textbooks, ranging from 1979 to 2016

I spent the summer of 2016 examining these charged politics in Sri Lanka. I conducted research for my senior thesis, which will seek to understand how and why government-issued history textbooks have changed in how they depict ethnic minorities during the course of the civil war and afterward. My research consisted two parts. One element was to analyze the current and past textbooks to understand how depictions of minorities have changed. The second was to interview those involved in the production of textbooks, to assess the influences on the process.

Thanks to the generous funding received from the South Asia Institute, I was able to achieve both of those goals. I am now back on campus and getting into the process of writing my thesis, and I am so thankful for having been able to do my research over the summer.

Fishing boats off the coast of Jaffna town

I am from Sri Lanka and lived there prior to coming to Harvard, so whenever my research kept me in Colombo I stayed at my family’s home. Doing a solo research project in Sri Lanka was actually an incredibly new experience, during which I learned much more about my own country. I interviewed 27 people connected to the production of textbooks, ranging from an ex-Secretary to the Ministry of Education, to present administrators at the National Institute of Education and Educational Publications Department, to leaders of civil society who have campaigned for and against textbook reform, to academics studying history across the country.

From these conversations, I learned about the politics and pressures at play in the production of a history textbook. I also gained some great insight about the complexities of education policy and reform in general, which I truly valued since I plan to work in education in Sri Lanka in the future. For this same reason, I appreciated all the time I spent in the different government agencies and ministries, as I could perceive how different branches of the government worked.

Lucky sighting of elephants crossing road, Eastern province

Some of my favorite experiences this summer included several trips to Jaffna in the North, and Kandy in the center, to speak to academics based at the Universities of Jaffna and Peradeniya respectively, as well as different civil society organizations such as the Ceylon Tamil Teachers’ Union. I had not visited either city for many years, and traveling there alone as a researcher was a completely new experience. Memories I will particularly cherish from the summer were my train rides between Colombo, Peradeniya and Jaffna: racing the sunset as the Udarata Menike barreled down the central hills at dusk, or watching the changing landscapes of Sri Lanka as the Yal Devirushed north through wet zone, dry zone, town, field, village, and jungle.

Once, as I was going up to Peradeniya for an interview, the train engine broke down. We were stuck for an hour in the middle of nowhere waiting for a replacement engine, as I slowly realized that I was going to miss my interviewee – whom I had been trying to interview for weeks. As the conductor walked through the compartments I explained my predicament to him, and he suggested that I hop off the train and wait for another one that would pass by soon. As I stood on the edge of the other track with ten other passengers preparing to unceremoniously switch trains, surrounded by paddy fields, I felt very far from Cambridge MA.

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Student voices: Nepal in recovery

By Haibei Peng, Master in Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2017

Haibei traveled to Nepal over the summer to work on her research project ‘The Nested Scale of Time: to protect and display biodiversity in South Asia through research on agriculture and seed bank.’

With the generous support from SAI Research Grant, I traveled through Nepal in May, 2016 for two weeks to conduct my thesis research on traditional Nepalese architecture and post-earthquake reconstruction in Kathmandu. During the two weeks I spent in Nepal, I traveled through Kathmandu, Pokhara and Chitwan national forest while talking to local residents, friends, foreign workers, volunteers and international organizations. Even though Nepal remains a poor country with bad infrastructure and is still recovering from the earthquake disaster, people here are all very friendly, welcoming and seem to share a happy attitude towards life and their country. Below are some of the most stimulating findings from my research.

Portal

What I found the most interesting during my time in Nepal is the housing typology of the traditional neighborhood in Kathmandu and particularly around Durbar Square. Walking down the narrow streets in the afternoon, food market and street vendors take over the already crowded streets. Pedestrians, bikes, cars and ricksha all cramp close to each other. On two sides of the streets, there are many narrow and short doors leading into a dark hall way. At first, I thought they are the entrances to private homes, then when I walked down one, I realized that after walking across the dark hallway while bending my back to avoid hitting my head, a big courtyard appears. Usually at the center of the courtyard is a small temple or statue, while surrounding it are many individual houses. I was told it used to be that one courtyard belonged to one big family, but with the development of the city during the past years, now the courtyards are usually divided up with different owners. Each building has a very small footprint because of the high land price. The buildings usually go up three to four stories, sometimes higher if the family needs more space. In many cases you can see clearly that the top floor was a recent addition. The narrow, short and dark tunnel leading from the busy street to the quiet courtyard is almost like a portal transforming your experience entirely. Within a courtyard, you can see kids playing and grandma walking around the Hindu statue to pray. It is the true local life.

Post-Earthquake

From Durbar Square to residential homes, there are long wooden poles painted in yellow everywhere supporting the structures in danger. Piles of fallen structures and bricks still scatter everywhere. When asked about when/how the post-earthquake reconstruction is going to take place, no one I had talked to in Nepal seemed to be able to give an answer at all. At the Dunbar Square in Kathmandu next to the ruins, I found the conservation programme office where I spoke to architect Amit Bajracharya and Gaurav Shrestha. Both of them have worked here since the earthquake trying to help with the rebuilt program by collaborating with the Office of Archeology and other international organizations. Gaurav told me that the process has been slow because of the lack of resources and because the government officials keep changing. They seem hopeful that the reconstruction will eventually take place.

I met Toya Nath Subedi, a tour guide, at the Durbar Square, who knows some Chinese and was trying to talk to me and show me around to earn some money. When asked about the post-earthquake reconstruction, he shook his hand. He told me that the government initially told the people they will get some money to help rebuild their homes but it has not happened and probably will never happen. In terms of the historical sites, he felt heartbroken when they were destroyed because he has spent so much time around them growing up in the city. He said the government should have tried to re-stabilize the ancient structures with the help of technology a long time ago and there were international organizations who offered to help. However, because the government did not want their history to be “touched” by “foreigners”, it never happened and as a result the earthquake easily destroyed majority of the historical sites.

I also visited the UNESCO Office in Kathmandu and spoke to consultant Thomas Schrom there. He has lived and worked in Kathmandu for the past couple decades. He spoke about some of the difficulties working on conservation projects in Nepal. He said that even though they get donations from the world, they have to get approval from the Nepalese government before they can work on the historical sites here. However, the local government still does not want to disclose many of the information and drawings because of their nationalism ideas and lack of trust.

Agriculture

Agriculture is an important part of Nepal’s economy. Before I traveled to Nepal, I read about how it counted for on average about 60 percent of the GDP but farmers have limited access to improved seeds, new technologies and market opportunities. It wasn’t until I was in Nepal traveling into the smaller villages when I understood why– the infrastructure here is underdeveloped. The mountain roads connecting major cities are narrow and congested. For example, traveling between the two major cities Kathmandu and Pokhara takes at least 6-7 hours even though the distance in between is only 124 miles. Because of these reasons, seedbank becomes particularly important for agriculture communities in Nepal so the local community can collect and store their seed resources. Currently, the ASIA Regional Agricultural Innovation Summit 2016 “Feed the Future” is having a session in Nepal to try to introduce new technology in Nepalese Agriculture.

International Responsibility

Nepal is known as the heaven for hikers. Many people may not know much about the country, but they certainly know about the peak, the tallest in the world, called Mount Everest. I visited the international mountain museum in Pokhara and was moved by people’s effort to preserve the history and culture of mountains and mountaineering here.

At the front of the main museum stands a statue to remember all the climbers who lost their lives here. I also met international Engineers who are also hikers working here in Nepal. One group I met has been trying to produce bio energy with the trash international hikers left behind at the last small village on the route for the Everest Mountain hike. When I spoke to them, they were very passionate about the project and the positive impact of it. They told me that they work for a big engineering company in the US and this has been their pro bono project for the past few years. They have gotten the local government’s approval and are trying to train a few local people to be able to operate the bio energy facility they are setting up. This will allow the local to turn waste hikers left behind into power they can use to make their life better and more convenient. The hospitality of people in Nepal is respected and appreciated by all the international visitors

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Student voices: The shipbreaking capital of the world

By Marisa Houlahan, Harvard College ’17

With the support of the South Asia Institute, I spent the summer in Chittagong, Bangladesh, conducting ethnographic research for a senior thesis on the shipbreaking industry. Over the past decade, a confluence of geographic, historical, economic, geologic, and political factors has shaped South Asia, and Chittagong in particular, as the shipbreaking capital of the world. More than 70% of the world’s defunct merchant and passenger vessels are now dismantled in South Asia, where labor and environmental regulations are largely unenforced and shipbreaking yards do without the expensive infrastructure required to break ships in places like Japan, Korea, Europe, and the United States. The shipbreaking industry in Chittagong fills nearly half of the country’s growing demand for steel and provides thousands of jobs, however unstable. The industry is also responsible for the deaths of dozens of workers each year, who are victims of gas explosions, falling steel plates, and other accidents, and for leaching lead, asbestos, oil sludge, and other hazardous materials into the water, soil, and bodies of shipbreakers.

Since around 2005, the Chittagong shipbreaking industry has been a subject of intense fascination for foreign journalists, documentarians, artists, and reporters. Throughout the course of interviews, actors in the shipbreaking industry pointed to a myriad of potential causes for this foreign curiosity: the visual spectacle of massive ships run aground on the beach, exoticization of poverty and manual labor, generosity and a desire to alleviate suffering, implicit racism, and the attractively but deceptively simple narrative of the externalities of the developed world internalized in the developing world, a unidirectional movement which provokes pity, sympathy, distance, and moral indignation among the developed. Media attention and NGO involvement, both foreign and Bangladeshi, have gone hand in hand, and in the process have produced a set of frameworks through which the industry is frequently discussed. Newspaper articles might cast shipbreaking as a calculus between economic benefit and environmental degradation, or, most popularly, as a site of overwhelming death. Shipyards are described as “graveyards” or “hellish,” ships as “skeletal” or “end of life,” and even workers as perpetually near death.

It was in the tangle of these intertwining narratives that I began my research in Bangladesh. I attempted to listen to the stories of people embedded in the industry, and from those stories begin to unearth the details that NGO reports, news articles, and adventure journalism tend to elide. Beyond that, I look to make claims about the situatedness of the Chittagong shipbreaking industry within a multinational system of legal regulations, the production of categories like “global” and “local,” and the inequities of transnational capitalism. I asked, what forces create Chittagong, and the bodies of local and migrant workers, as sites for shipbreaking and shipbreaking labor? How do legal regulations, aesthetic sensibilities, material demands, and the political economy of the shipbreaking industry create ships as ruins, waste, or commodities at the intersections between regimes of value? How might ships, largely conceived as wasted or ruinous, instead be both implicated in vibrant human and nonhuman networks and productive of new social and material worlds?

My fieldwork began by connecting with Young Power in Social Action (YPSA), a Chittagonian social development organization that has been fighting for the past decade to make the shipbreaking industry safer, to enforce the many regulations in place, and to hold ship owners and shipping companies accountable for the fate of their vessels. Through YPSA I researched the history of institutional and legal involvement in shipbreaking and studied the processes and assumptions that ground foreign media attention by shadowing the work of foreign photojournalists and news writers. Along the highway running parallel to the shipbreaking yards, I observed and interviewed at the scrap shops selling items from ships – everything from spoons and life jackets to compressors and generators – to families, distributors in Dhaka, and industrial clients. I also visited the steel mills tied to the industry, and conducted interviews with the vast global network of industry actors, including lawyers in London, shipbrokers in Singapore, antiques dealers in Boston and North Carolina, filmmakers in Dhaka, Germany, and Korea, and shipyard owners, activists, government officials, ship captains, bankers, buyers of ship products, middlemen, academics, and laborers in Chittagong.

My methodological framework during my research was guided by anthropologist Anna Tsing’s ethnography of global connection developed in her book Friction, which pays close attention to the awkward encounters where aspiring universals like capitalism or commodity fetishism emerge in the particular and take on different meanings for different people, creating the productive friction of misunderstandings, partnerships, and unlikely connections. I come away from my fieldwork intrigued by an unexpected aspiring universal, which appeared over and over in interviews with everyone from international lawmakers to steel mill employees – waste. In Chittagong, I found that the easiest way to get laughed at was to ask a Bangladeshi, “So, what gets thrown away?” After chuckling indulgently at my naiveté, people usually told me that nothing gets wasted in Bangladesh; there is a use and a market for everything. This stands starkly at odds with shipbreaking legislation produced by the United Nations, which treats ships as floating pieces of waste, as well as with the practices of shipyards that claim, for the benefit of foreign visitors, to build hazardous waste storage facilities that are in fact empty rooms. Foreign and Bangladeshi NGOs rally around the damage done to the human and nonhuman environment by the waste products of broken ships, while scrap market owners and steel mills scoff at the idea of ships as waste in the first place when they are confronted every day with the task of turning ship into cash. Nor does the assertion that nothing gets wasted in Bangladesh always square with the things I saw – cracked porcelain sinks originally from ships and now strewn haphazardly on a highway median, food and household scraps encroaching on city streets, and what Zygmunt Bauman would controversially call the “wasted lives” of people excluded from the possibility of capitalist production.

These ethnographic encounters lead me to wonder, what is waste? When is waste? How is waste managed, commodified, and contested? What assumptions and responsibilities, legal and moral, are variously seen to be attached to the narrative designation of waste? What regimes of value does waste connect or challenge? How is waste attached to or a conduit for power? I hope to address these questions, at least partially, as I continue down the rabbit hole of the Bangladeshi shipbreaking industry.

[harvardsai]

Alum Q+A: Saving the environment and improving women’s lives, one pad at a time

This is part of a series of profiles of Harvard alumni who are young entrepreneurs in South Asia.

Menstrual hygiene is an obstacle for women in many developing countries, including India. Even as the use of sanitary pads becomes more widespread, new environmental problems have emerged for proper disposal.

Saathi, founded by several MIT/Harvard graduates who met while studying mechanical engineering, is trying to change that. They have developed an eco-friendly pad made entirely from local banana fiber that is fully compostable and bio-degradable.

SAI recently spoke with three of the founders, Kristin Kagetsu, CEO, Amrita Saigal, CFO, and Grace Kane, CTO, to learn more about the product and how they hope it improves the lives of women in India.

SAI: To start, could you give a little background about your organization – what problem did you see that prompted you to create this product?

Amrita: This started when I was a junior at MIT. I was working for Procter & Gamble in the feminine hygiene division, for Always and Tampax as a design engineer. And during that time, when I started researching the sanitary pad market in India, I came across the fact that lack of access to sanitary pads was a leading reason for high dropout rates for school-age girls as compared to boys. The main reasons for women and girls not using pads are affordability, availability, and awareness.

This really stuck with me, especially given that for us, having grown up here [in the US], we don’t live in societies where we had these kind of issues. We’ve been given every opportunity to grow up, have dreams, and pursue our education. We started to think: How could we use our engineering skills to design products that are going to help girls in underprivileged areas and help girls achieve their full potential?

After a lot of research, we realized that banana fiber was the best material because it is readily available, super absorbent, and it’s actually a waste product; farmers actually have to cut the tree down after harvest.  When we were all on the ground on India, we started doing initial user testing with our low cost product made of banana fiber. One of the biggest issues that we came across was disposal. The women loved the product and the feel, but in rural areas there is no proper disposal system for the pad. It’s such a taboo topic.

Grace: Another option for disposal is burning them. As Amrita said, we originally were really focused on the look of the pads, but what actually happened in the midst of our journey, is this phenomenon in India called “The Sanitary Pad Revolution,” where the government also recognized that this was a huge problem, and there was this big push to just get as many low-cost pads to women as possible. But organizations started realizing that you can’t just put all these non-biodegradable products into somewhere without a waste infrastructure.

Amrita: Our original product was still partly made from plastic. So we kept getting feedback that the women liked our product, but we needed something that is biodegradable and compostable.

Grace: We realized that this was a good opportunity to try and make a sanitary pad that was just as helpful and just as available but with a far less impact on the environment.

So biodegradable in this case means compostable really quickly, in a couple of months under composting conditions. The standard for normal sanitary pad is in terms of decades or more. It doesn’t immediately dissolve when you throw it away of course, but it’s quite an improvement.

Kristin: One of the things that’s going to be exciting is thinking of composting and figuring out, does the village have that capability? There are a lot of villages that have been composting already. So trying to integrate into those systems in this way is already interesting and is definitely going to be an exciting thing.

SAI: It seems like part of your solution is making sure you are working full-circle with everyone involved, including for example, the banana farmers. Was that intentional?

Grace: Well, we originally chose the banana fiber because it’s cheap and we also wanted to have something that’s local and actually puts some money back into the local communities. Because right now, in a lot of cases, the banana farmers have to actually pay for extra labor to get rid of this stuff [waste from the trees]. But then, once we made the decision to form an eco-friendly product, we really wanted this kind of full-circle mentality.  As Kristin said, composting and a lot of things are already going on in the ecosystem, so we are trying to see how can we fit into that.

SAI: What kind of scale are you going for, and how many women have you reached?

Amrita: Our goal is to launch with one million pads, hopefully in October in villages in Jharkhand, Rajasthan, and Gujarat. Part of it is also teaching female health workers about proper menstrual hygiene. As they go distribute the pads, they can also share information about proper feminine hygiene. Awareness and education are a huge part of this. Many rural women have no idea what is happening to their body when they get their first period. Villages don’t have sex education or health education in government schools. And at home it’s a taboo topic.

SAI: That’s true, in many countries it is still a taboo topic. Has this been a challenge while you’ve been working on your product?

Kristin: We’ve been hosting workshops, and we were actually kind of nervous and excited to see who would show up, and how it would go. We actually were surprised that there were both men and women participating in the workshop, giving some feedback, and asking questions. We found that people were curious, and they wanted to know more.

Grace: When we first started, we did a survey with rural women and we found some interesting things. In some of the villages, there was no sex ed, but they had all seen an advertisement for Proctor and Gamble pads. But of course even though they had all seen these on TV, they could never actually afford one, so it was seen as a luxury item rather than something that is actually important for your health.

The other unusual thing that’s coming up with the sanitary pad revolution is that, and this is my personal opinion, now in the Indian media, it’s become a lot more ok to talk about pads and to talk about periods. However, that doesn’t mean that women are necessarily being involved in the discussion as much as they should be. I think there have been a lot of government initiatives where it was championed as a cause, but a lot of the people involved in the discussion were still men. But that’s by no means universal – there’s a lot of great, brilliant, female-run NGOs that are working in the area of menstrual hygiene.

Kristin: I agree, there are definitely initiatives run by women as well, even if you look at a lot of the more popular well-known names for manufacturers of pads, even the low-cost ones, they are all men making and distributing them. At least for now, until the others become bigger, and more well-known, there isn’t as much representation from women.

Grace: Which isn’t to say that’s a bad thing – it’s actually great to see men involved in the discussion because it becomes a whole community thing. That’s the other side to it – that people will stand up and say, this is actually ok to talk about.

SAI: How will the pads affect day-to-day life for women? How will they affect their education, or their ability to work?

Grace: That’s one of the biggest things: freedom.  A lot of surveys show that girls don’t want to go to school because they’re afraid of their pad leaking. Some of the women we initially surveyed said that if they didn’t always buy pads, they’d buy them for special occasions. For emergencies basically. With the implication that normally, they wouldn’t be able to afford pads so they would just stay off work. It’s the simple fact that they don’t want to have an accident when they go out of the house so they stay home.

Amrita: Comfort is a huge thing. When you are comfortable, you feel more confident.

SAI: Do you have any advice for young entrepreneurs who want to work in South Asia?

Kristin: Do research! Be flexible as well. For example, if we had come here and we said, we are married to our idea and we will not change it no matter what, we would have been in trouble. It really depends who’s on your team, what resources you have, and that can change depending on the moment, and what’s the situation of the market at the time. Even if you have an idea, you have to be able to change it or modify it. Our idea has developed over time and has gotten better.

Amrita: Go spend times in the villages. Go live with them. You need to get to know them. Another important thing is finding strong local partners.

SAI: At SAI, we encourage students to think of South Asia as a laboratory to try their ideas – it sounds like you agree.

Grace: If people want to be entrepreneurs with a social purpose, South Asia is a really good place to do that right now. There are a lot of investors, competitions, incubators, and people in general who are really focused on making a difference through technology and entrepreneurship. The environment we see around India and technology is more inclined towards social entrepreneurship than things are in the US. The atmosphere in India is a place where people believe in entrepreneurship as a force for change.

Kristin: I agree, this is a good time. India is an amazing place to make a difference because in India, the number of people you can impact is many times more than in some developed countries. It’s really exciting.

If you are interested in supporting Saathi, you may do so here.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

-Meghan Smith

[harvardsai]

Student Voices: Buddhist art in Odisha

This is part of a series in which we share reports from Harvard students who have traveled to South Asia with support from a SAI grant.

By Sonali Dhingra, PhD candidate, History of Art and Architecture, Harvard

My dissertation on “Buddhist art in Odisha between the seventh and eleventh century” is based on sculptural and architectural remains from the south-eastern Indian coastal state of Odisha. A generous grant from the South Asia Institute at Harvard enabled me to learn Odia, the primary language spoken in region. I spent the summer in the green and beautiful city of Bhubaneshwar, also known as the “city of temples”.

Classes were arranged through the American Institute of Indian studies, as Odia is not taught at Harvard and is seldom learned by graduate students working on South Asia. In fact, I was the only student in the program which was consequently well-tailored to my needs. The language program segued seamlessly into my field-work year and after a successful completion of the program, I visited several living temples, small villages and archaeological sites in rural Odisha, where knowing Odia is a definite asset. Medieval Odiya literature is indispensable for tracing the lives of the images and architectural spaces that I am studying for my dissertation project.

Throughout the summer, I learned how to read, write, and speak Odiya. Most of all, I enjoyed learning the difficult, but beautifully rounded, “umbrella-topped” unique Odia script. Two days into the program, I realized how much incessant typing on a computer had reduced my ability to write easily, let alone beautifully. Soon enough though, the long dictations that my teacher gave me were one of the most therapeutic times of my day and by the end of the term I was able to impress some of my Odia friends with my handwriting!

I found that being an Indian and having fluency in Hindi was both an advantage and disadvantage while learning Odia. I noticed that the Odia script is deceptively similar to Devanagari and took a few days to retrain myself. Once I got a hang of reading, I religiously browsed the local newspapers and looked forward to my daily dose of regional politics, entertainment (such as the culinary wars between Odisha and Bengal over “who invented the Rosogolla (an Indian sweet)?”) and my often dramatic zodiac horoscope. Afternoons and evenings were spent reading and translating a Ramayana in Odia, reading short stories and conversing with my host family in Odia. I also wrote a journal every weekend. My teacher and his wife ensured that I felt immersed culturally. From them, I learned how to prepare some delicacies from Odisha. After initially shocking my hosts with my uncouth North Indian habits, I understood the nuanced ways of proper dining etiquette in Odia culture: one must not touch their food with the left hand! I was also fortunate to be in Odisha during the annual Jagannatha Ratha Yatra or chariot festival and get a flavor of how anchored people’s lives were around this festival. The Jagannatha trio was everywhere: billboards, newspapers, TV and at entrances to cultural centers. On a weekend, I made a trip to the famous Sun Temple in Konark, and also enjoyed the beautiful natural landscape that surrounded the architectural marvel. My host family took me to a few plays in the evenings that allowed me to feel part of the Bhubaneshwar culture scene. 

Hindi Bollywood films and TV soap-operas have made a huge impact on the regional culture in Odisha. Most Bhubaneshwar locals were puzzled and some even laughed uncontrollably when I told them that I was living in their city to learn the language. When I tried to talk to them in Odia, they would instead reply to me in Hindi, but were amused by my insistence on replying to them in Odia. To be honest, it was a bit hard to be the only student in the program but I found a community to interact with on a regular basis. The cab-driver who took me to class everyday was the staunchest proponent of language immersion that I have met in Odisha!

At the end of two months, I had already read a newspaper article on the theft of medieval sculptures in a village 150 kms from Bhubaneshwar. This news piece provided me leads for subsequent field-research. Continuing on in Odisha after the summer program for dissertation research, I found that speaking Odia in villages allows me greater access to images in worship. I can also communicate more easily with sculptors and locals alike. I am thankful to SAI for providing me the opportunity to kick-start field-work with an opportunity to learn the language in a focused manner. Each day that I spend in Odisha allows me newer insights into the visual culture – none of which could have been possible without knowing the language of the people.