Kumbh’s pop-up mega city ‘unlike any other research’ for Harvard team

Not like any field research I've done before," is how John Macomber, senior lecturer of business administration at Harvard Business School, describes his Maha Kumbh experience. He is part of a 36-member team from Harvard that was in India recently to study various aspects of the Kumbh Mela and "map the metabolism of the city" .

The team, comprising undergraduates and graduate students, case writers and professors, architects and anthropologists, doctors and documentarians, visited Allahabad for five days last week to undertake interdisciplinary research in a number of fields, such as urban studies and design, religious and cultural studies, environment science and public health, technology and communications. Led by Prof Diana Eck of the Harvard Divinity School, the faculty engaged in different projects at the Kumbh with their respective students.

Eck, a leading scholar of India's pilgrimage tradition, sees the Kumbh as an opportunity to wed Hinduism's longstanding reverence for the natural environment and its sacred rivers to a growing campaign to clean up the Ganges. "Definitely the mela is an incredible and astonishing human undertaking. Just the organisational logistics involved in managing so many people over a few months in one spot is tremendous. Our project seeks to understand this unique phenomenon better," she says.

"I think Harvard has a lot to learn from south Asia," says associate director of Harvard's South Asia Institute, Meena Hewett, adding, "One thing you'll hear from all faculty is the issue of scalability. It's very easy to transform the lives of one or two individuals. But when you're working on issues that affect two billion people, the impact is huge. The Kumbh Mela is a microcosm of the region."

Tarun Khanna of HBS is fascinated by the massive temporary township that springs up on the sandy banks of the converging rivers. "Spread over 1,940 hectares, it's quite amazing for scholars like us to observe such speedy migration into a city like this. It makes for a unique, rapidly moving laboratory — and offers us a special opportunity to study everything from the process of organisation to the interplay of commerce and technology," he says.

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