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India

Susan Hockfield, the first MIT president to visit India while in office, met with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.



MIT India Initiative

Projects

The Initiative includes a wide but fully coordinated set of projects. Those already well established include:

  • Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, which addresses the most challenging questions of poverty by using rigorous research methods to influence policies on issues like improving education, and extending the benefits of modern health care to new Indian populations;
  • MIT-India Program, whose efforts range from giving MIT students an immersion experience in Indian research settings to organizing India-based seminars in which leading representatives of India and MIT discuss key issues affecting India's growth and development;
  • UrbLab, which from its base in Mumbai engages with the challenge of explosive urban growth, focusing in particular on ways of addressing the important questions raised by such growth;
  • Project Prakash, which involves the identification by an MIT- Indian team of Indian children affected by blindness — a very common affliction in current-day India — and the delivery both of treatments and of sight-related learning regimens once vision has been restored.

New or evolving ventures, meanwhile, include the following:

  • Health sciences and technology collaboration, through which MIT and Harvard health sciences experts are working with their Indian partners to build a world-class staff for the new Translational Institute of Health Science and Technology in Delhi; and
  • I3 (I-Cubed), which is working to put new forms of technological know- how into practice in India.

And there are more projects from Global MIT.

Through these and other ventures, the MIT-India Initiative facilitates intellectual exchanges among MIT faculty and students, leading India specialists from the U.S. and other countries, and visiting academics and prominent public figures from India. The MII also sponsors lectures at MIT by distinguished Indian academic, governmental, and business leaders whose work is intended to yield an improved understanding of India's most compelling issues. More broadly, the Initiative is making possible new collaborative research ventures involving MIT and its Indian partnering institutions; seeking funding for international exchange programs that involve reciprocal student and faculty visits between Cambridge and selected Indian institutions; and encouraging the use of cutting-edge technologies to foster India's economic growth and an enhanced global understanding of the new, emerging India.

 

Support MIT's activities in India

Gifts to support activities of the MIT faculty, students, and staff engaged in activities related to India or activities of Indian faculty, students, and staff engaged in activities related to the MIT-India Initiative.