Experience India The Indian Field Seminar (IM853) January 1-14, 2012
The seminar is open to both full-time and part-time MPH students
Applications currently being accepted
India is in the midst of extraordinary change, development, and growth. The country contains the most sophisticated of western technology, companies fully competitive on a global level, and a middle class of a size to rival our own. At the same time, much of Indian infrastructure is underdeveloped or in decay and there are hundreds of millions of people living in extreme poverty. Indian business leaders and entrepreneurs are among the most educated and creative in the world, and yet traditional rigid social hierarchies are still strong. The obvious potential for continued dramatic growth is mixed with complex cultural and social challenges.
Nowhere are these intensely contradictory forces more apparent than in the health sector. Indian drug firms have transformed the face of AIDS treatment in the developing world. Major urban hospitals provide medical tourism services for the elite of Europe and the Middle East. And yet care for much of the population is extremely limited.
• Touch and understand the reality of the Indian health sector firsthand, traveling to Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, visiting critical organizations and meeting with top leadership.
• Visit AIIMS, the top academic medical center in India, and Narayana, an extraordinary specialty hospital system in Bangalore, meeting with Devi Shetty its charismatic founder.
• Interact with leadership at the Public Health Foundation of India
• Visit traditional rural India and a primary care center in the Dharavi slum of Mumbai.
• Interact with executives of top multinational pharmaceutical companies as well as leading India-based companies, including Cipla and Biocon.
• Understand the paradoxes of intellectual property laws and pharmaceutical pricing in India.
• Tour GE’s center in Bangalore, and learn how innovation works in the Indian context.
• See the work of entrepreneurs who are finding new ways to add value and address these consuming challenges, sometimes in ways that put our own systems to shame.
This field seminar will engage all students interested in understanding the complex dynamics of an emerging country, through the particularly telling lens of the health sector, and will include the chance to learn about the culture and values that underpin this great democracy and booming economy.
Indian Field Seminar Presentation
MPH Students
This is a course in the School of Management and the third time it is being offered. School of Public Health Students are welcome to attend also, and have in the past. The class is capped at 20 and there are three spaces left. Feel free to contact me at mallan@bu.edu. If you would like to contact a public health student who has taken part please let me know. I would also be happy to speak with you.
Mark Allan, Faculty Director, Health Sector Management Program, BU School of Management
