Simply a case of giving back, says Sanjeev Mehra

Sanjeev K Mehra, the key benefactor for the envisaged $4 million South Asia chair at Harvard, says it is simply a case of giving back. Mehra, who came to the US at age 19, said that he and his wife Karen Peterson Mehra, "both met at Harvard College where we were classmates in 1982, where I was an economics major and she was doing government studies."

Their gift will now endow the 'Mehra Family Professorship of South Asian Studies,' in support of Harvard's major expansion of activity related to South Asia.

After their undergraduate degrees and a two-year stint at McKinsey and Co, Mehra did his MBA from Harvard Business School while Paterson went on to do a master's in anthropology at Columbia University.

New Delhi-born Mehra is now managing director and partner in the Principal Investment Area of Goldman, Sachs & Co, where he leads the industrial private equity investing effort.

"I have benefited in many ways from Harvard and so did she," he said. "After all, we met there, and so we were trying to figure out how to contribute back and the idea came up of trying to do something that would link India and America."

Mehra recalled: "When I was at Harvard there was very little study of India and South Asia. There was a lot of study of China and Japan, but very little of South Asia. And given that one in four people in the world live in the Indian subcontinent, we felt it was important to shine the light on what was going on there. And, to do so, not in a sense of its history or mythology or religion - there has been a lot of focus on that [at Harvard].

"What we said is," he continued, "we'd like this professorship to be focused on contemporary India, and it didn't have to be tied to any one area of expertise and it could be university-wide - thus, giving the university the most flexibility to appoint someone that met their needs."

Mehra said there was no specificity that the professorship be tied to contemporary India, vis-à-vis business and economy, "but all of contemporary India - social issues, political issues, economic issues, all of those. Things that affect people's lives day to day in the country."

He said the discussions had gone on for some time with Harvard faculty led by the director of the South Asia Initiative Professor Sugata Bose and other professors. "But there was never enough critical mass," he said. "Finally, I think enough of us got together and said this is the right time. And it happened to coincide with my wife and my 25th reunion [at Harvard], so we thought it was the right thing to do."

Mehra said the selection of the scholar to occupy this chair was "entirely up to the university. They'll inform us of course, but it's their decision."

He said he hoped that this chair and the South Asia Institute would "allow a lot more students and faculty to experience and learn and research about India and for Harvard to be the center of not just Indian, but South Asian studies in America, where it is viewed as the 'go to' institution - where there will be the South Asia experts, where there will be important people from India visiting regularly, and people from the university traveling to India." This, he said, was essentially, to "bring the two worlds a little bit closer, both in terms of understanding and impact on our society."

Mehra said it was a no-brainer that India "is already a major global player," and that his company, which invested early in India and "has a long history there," had recently redoubled its efforts there.

"There is no Fortune 500 company board that doesn't think about what it's doing in India, its India strategy...," he argued. "India has always been an important factor," in the globalizing world, "but now, given what's going on in the last five years, it's emerged as a force in its own right."

Mehra said he believed India today was awash with "enlightened leadership, people who are technocrats, people who understand the global economy, who understand that India is inextricably linked to what's going on in the world - that it cannot be an island, that the policies cannot be so different from the rest of the world, whether it's privatisation or inflows of capital or how Indian companies grab the incentives to go abroad."