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Tarun Khanna steps down as head of Harvard’s South Asia Institute
The institute launched several major projects during his tenure, including studies on the Kumbh Mela.
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Malvika Choudhary - Thu, 29, May 2025
- 13:21 EDT
- 29
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Tarun Khanna / Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Tarun Khanna, the faculty director of the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University will step down from his role on July 1.
Khanna was appointed director in 2010 when the then South Asia Initiative operated from a single office with one staff member. Under his leadership, the center expanded into an endowed institute with offices in Cambridge and New Delhi.
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“From day one, I said, this is a platform and anybody’s welcome,” said Khanna, Jorge Paulo Lemann professor at Harvard Business School. He will be succeeded by Diana L. Eck.
One of Khanna’s early goals was to create an open structure that would allow faculty across Harvard’s schools to participate, rather than having the center follow the director’s own interests.
To institutionalize this approach, Khanna established a faculty Steering Committee with representatives from every Harvard school. “This governance system was effectively an organizational commitment for the open platform idea,” he said.
The institute launched several major projects during his tenure, including studies on the Kumbh Mela, the Partition of British India, universal health coverage in India, and meritocracy in India and China. The Kumbh Mela initiative, led by Diana L. Eck and Rahul Mehrotra, was a defining early moment.
Commenting on the Kumbh Mela project, Khanna said, “That project was our first large-scale expression of One Harvard. Until that point, we hadn’t really made it come alive, and we demonstrated this was possible.”
Reflecting on the institute’s impact, Khanna said alumni often tell him they wish it had existed during their time at Harvard. “I think this is the most emotive expression of something that they either explicitly or viscerally thought was missing,” he said.
Despite the institute’s expansion, Khanna believes more can be done. “We’ve barely scratched the surface of possibility at an institution as intellectually rich as Harvard. We work with less than 5 percent of the faculty, and there’s an opportunity to expand that quite dramatically.”
He will return full-time to Harvard Business School. “I’m always interested in large-scale social problems, and there’s no shortage of intellectual and policy projects at HBS and across Harvard’s faculties,” he said.
Born in India and a graduate of Princeton and Harvard, Khanna is an acclaimed author and economist whose research spans diasporas, emerging markets, and globalization.
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