Tarun Khanna, Harvard SAI boss, expects Arun Jaitley to make GST case at Mahindra lecture

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will speak on India’s tax reform, the country’s political hot potato, at Harvard’s South Asia Institute (SAI) on the evening of October 11 at Loeb House which is one of University’s most stately speaking venues. Jaitley will then head to Washington DC for the annual IMF and World Bank Fall meetings. Before Harvard, Jaitley will speak at Columbia University in New York, October 10. Tarun Khanna, director Harvard SAI and Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School spoke to Firstpost on the Harish C Mahindra lecture that Jaitley is slated to deliver. Excerpts, lightly edited for brevity, are here: [caption id=“attachment_4120593” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Harvard SAI chief Tarun Khanna[/caption] Firstpost: Did Harvard SAI send out the invite to the Finance Minister? Did you have a longlist of speakers? Tarun Khanna: Arun (Jaitley) is here, I would gather, because of the IMF meetings primarily, so somebody reached out to me from the Embassy in India a few weeks ago saying that he (Jaitley) would like to make a speech…and then I thought that this is a person who’s in a senior enough position that perhaps it’s a good opportunity for the Mahindra Lecture Series. So, nobody is out there looking for speakers. We are constantly getting recommendations from the community and from our academic steering committee. There’s no solicitiation or blanket outreach. We have 50 to 80 events a year. Within that we have more specific, slightly higher profile lecture series which are called endowed lecture series. They are set up based on some philanthropist deciding that he or she wants to support a particular type of conversation. So this particular one that Arun (Jaitley) is speaking at is the Harish C Mahindra lecture series. This was originally planned as an India-only series but occasionally, there have been deviations. But the idea generally is someone of eminence and status in India. It’s roughly once a year but that’s not watertight. Sometimes, two years have passed without a speaker but this year, this is our second speaker. So the periodicity is defined more by somebody that meets the criteria of having contributed to India’s society and from whom we can learn something and can productively engage with our community. Firstpost: Jaitley is scheduled to speak on “India’s tax reform” ? Is the topic the speaker’s choice or Harvard’s? Tarun Khanna: In most cases, it’s pretty obvious. Like when Mr. (APJ) Kalam came here, we knew what he would talk about. In this case too, the topic is chosen by Mr. Jaitley. This is the current thing, he’s trying to reform the tax system in India and it’s a topic that I agreed to because it is very important and suited to his current role as Finance Minister and it’s of general interest to those who are following public finance and taxes in many developing countries. We’re an academic institution, 100%. Our objective is to facilitate dissemination of ideas and that’s exactly what happens. After a speech or some comments by the speaker, there is audience engagement to various degrees…we usually have interactions planned around the event. It’s like any other prominent event at a major University. It facilitates connections and the development of ideas. On the South Asia Institute at Harvard University Tarun Khanna: T_he South Asia Institute inside Harvard was set up a few years ago and we have speakers coming every week the entire year, connected to South Asia in some way. Some are academics, activists, some are politicians, heads of state scientists, filmmakers, creative people and the general objective is to create a forum where people can engage and discuss issues relevant to South Asia. So, over the last five years or so, this has become possibly the dominant platform at least on the US East Coast for conversations about South Asia and that’s partly because Harvard is a sort of convening place. That’s the broader context._ Khanna, 49, along with HBS dean Nitin Nohria and professors Bharat N Anand, Srikant M Datar, Sunil Gupta, Ranjay Gulati and Krishna Palepu, is one of most celebrated academics of Indian origin at HBS. After schooling in Delhi, Khanna moved to the US. In 1984, he enrolled for a B.S. with a major in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton, which he completed in 1988, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. He then turned to business studies and economics and earned a Ph.D. in Business Economics from HBS in 1993. He, along with Dean Nohria, was one of the drivers of a Harvard Classroom in Mumbai. His work at the intersect of India and China, “Billions of Entrepreneurs,” has been translated in 8 languages. Also, Khanna has co-authored, “Winning in Big Emerging Markets,” and has a case to his name on Aadhaar (2012). The Narendra Modi government has gone on to make Aadhaar a major plank to grow its inclusion and digital strategy.