BOSTON—Newly-appointed Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar and two more Indian Americas– Narinder Singh Kapany (Posthumous) and Rattan Lal– have been awarded India’s prestigious Padma awards this year.
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Kapany was awarded Padma Vibhushan, and Datar and Lal both received Padma Shri. Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is among 119 recipients whom the Indian government on Monday selected for Padma awards–one of the highest civilian awards in the country. The government announced seven names for Padma Vibhushan, 10 names for Padma Bhushan and 102 names for Padma Shri this year.
Datar became the eleventh dean of Harvard Business School on 1 January 2021. During his tenure at the School, he has served as Senior Associate Dean for University Affairs (including Faculty Chair of the Harvard Innovation Lab), for Research, for Executive Education, for Faculty Development, and for Faculty Recruiting, according to his official HBS bio.
A graduate with distinction from the University of Bombay, Datar received gold medals upon graduation from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and the Institute of Cost and Works Accountants of India. A Chartered Accountant, he holds two masters degrees and a Ph.D. from Stanford University.
He is a co-author of the leading cost accounting textbook, Cost Accounting: A Managerial Emphasis (Prentice-Hall) and of Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads (Harvard Business Press). He has authored more than 30 cases on topics ranging from Data Science at Target to Nippon Steel.
Datar has taught MBA and executive education classes in design thinking, innovation, big data, and strategy implementation. Before joining the HBS faculty he held appointments at both Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University, where he received the George Leland Bach Award for Excellence in the Classroom and the Distinguished Teaching Award, respectively.
Datar serves on the Board of Directors of ICF International, Novartis AG, Stryker Corporation, and T-Mobile US, and has worked with many corporations on consulting and field-based projects. He was honored by the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) as the Public Company Director for 2020. He is a member of the American Accounting Association and the Institute of Management Accountants. He has served on the editorial board of several journals and presented his research to academic and executives audiences in North America, South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe.
Kapany, who was known as the ‘father of fiber optics’, is among the seven people named for the Padma Vibhushan awards this year. Kapany breathed his last in the US in December last year at the age of 94. He had more than 100 patents to his name and was the first to transmit images through fiber optics back in 1954.
Lal, a native Indian and citizen of the United States, is professor of soil science at the Ohio State University. He received the 2019 Japan Prize for the sustainable soil management for global food security and mitigation of climate change. He was awarded the 2020 World Food Prize for developing and mainstreaming a soil-centric approach to increasing food production that restores and conserves natural resources and mitigates climate change.
