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Kaushik Basu: Innovative thinkers and problem solvers from India have made Cornell their ivy league university for more than a century. In 1921, Asia's first Nobel Prize winner, Tagore, contacted Leonard Elmhirst at Cornell. The two of them met and there began a collaboration with India in the field of agriculture and rural reconstruction that has left its mark even till today. 

Prabhu Pingali: Bringing Cornell and India together allows us to learn from each other, allows us to learn from global experiences for India and then Cornell learning from India as it thinks about how do you solve problems in developing countries. This is a made-for-each-other moment for both. 

Aditya Vashistha: India is a world power. India is an emerging economy and there is this rich cultural diversity. At the same time, India poses super interesting challenges. 

Sarah Besky: Cornell Global Hubs is Cornell's new approach to faculty, student, and alumni engagement. And in India, we're taking an approach that brings together multiple institutions across the country. So much of international engagement can be remarkably extractive. And so one of our commitments at South Asia Program is to do work that is engaged with the community in which we work that's attentive to their concerns and their priorities. We have these long-standing programs that are primarily with community-based organizations and NGOs. 

Prabhu Pingali: The Tata-Cornell Institute is a standalone research center, which is part of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell, and we're focused on addressing the problems of malnutrition and rural poverty. We have academic partners, NGO partners, and other research think tanks that  we work with in India, and all of our students spend a year in India doing field-based research. That way our students are addressing real-life problems but with the rigor and analytical excellence that Cornell can provide.

Aditya Vashistha: My work focuses on technology and social impact. I design, build and evaluate culturally aware AI technologies. We already have a program where students from India are part of my lab, and it's important for us to go back there as well.

Sarah Besky: The Nilgiris Program is field-based learning par excellence: to bring Indigenous students and Cornell students into the classroom together to co-learn to think about regionally specific and community specific problems; whether they be questions of infrastructure, climate change, and
environmental degradation, about the effects of technology as they're felt by real people in real places, and lots more.

Aditya Vashistha: Our partnerships are essential so that we can identify the right problems to work on; to pool and share the resources and partnerships knowledge with each other. I have a lot of technology experience. But at the same time, I need domain expertise when I'm working with people who are addressing different socioeconomic challenges, health inequity challenges, people who are working on caste and gender. These are the kinds of conversations we should be having more.

Kaushik Basu: If we turn to peer into the next 100 years. It is clear. Cornell gets a lot from India and India also is enriched by this engagement. There is a huge amount of potential to realize ahead of us.