PDF: 2962 pages, 5.2 MB - Bay Area Council Economic Institute

Indian Students: Innovation and Quality of Life Are Still a Draw
The Berkeley Group for Architecture & Planning, a nonprofit alliance of architects, planners and
UC Berkeley professors and students, has been formed to design the Nanocity project—a sustainable,
economically viable, technologically advanced new town in India outside the city of
Chandighar. The project’s initial design phase is underwritten by Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia,
working in cooperation with a developer group and the Haryana State Industrial and Infrastructure
Development Corp.
Berkeley College of Environmental Design associate dean Nazer AlSayyad and professor Susan
Ubbelohde head the NanoCity design team, and Ananya Roy, professor of comparative urban
studies and international development within Berkeley’s Department of City and Regional Planning,
is a planning consultant to the project. (More information on Nanocity and Sabeer Bhatia
can be found in the Architecture/Urban Planning/Infrastructure section later of Chapter 6.)
Ashok Gadgil, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, developed technology in
the 1990s to quickly and cheaply disinfect drinking water using ultraviolet (UV) light. In a collaboration
with ICICI Bank, Naandi Foundation and local village councils, Gadgil’s UV Waterworks
technology has been licensed to WaterHealth International, which has set up over 200
WaterHealth Centres, mostly in Andhra Pradesh, to dispense treated water to rural residents.
Energy and Resources Group associate professor Isha Ray has researched and written on water
access, sanitation and pricing in rural India and is involved in ongoing community-level water
treatment and delivery projects in India, Mexico, Sri Lanka, and China.
Economist Ashok Deo Bardhan, with the Haas Business School’s Fisher Center for Real Estate
& Urban Economics, has written a 2004 book on globalization in California’s tech sector, as well
as numerous research papers on offshoring, innovation, international real estate, and globalization
of capital flows.
Economics professor Pranab Bardhan (no relation) has co-written textbooks on development
economics and has conducted field research and presented lectures on rural economics, models
for decentralized governance, and the economic impacts of trade and globalization. Bardhan and
Boston University scholar Dilip Mookherjee have studied the impacts of land reforms and the
panchayats (India’s 436 district councils within its states that function similarly to county or other
regional governments) on farm productivity and targeting of development assistance in 90 West
Bengal villages—a collaboration with the Indian Statistical Institute and Kolkata’s Center for the
Study of Social Sciences.
The Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies, founded in April 2006 with a $15 million
gift (including a $5 million challenge grant) from San Francisco financier Richard Blum, is
pursuing a number of projects in developing countries. One involving Berkeley faculty is Haath
Mein Sehat (HMS), or “Health in Your Hands,” a water purification and sanitation research program
in the Mumbai slums.
Shailendra Kumar, senior director for special projects and research funding at the College of Arts
and Letters, is currently pursuing alliances with the Indian Institutes of Technology, as well as other
prospective academic, government and corporate partners, relating to several multi-disciplinary
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