Hatim Husain from Nagpur, India, is an educator, scholarly writer, lawyer and the candidate of two prestigious fellowships namely, the Rhodes and the Schwarzman for the year 2020. He has previously pursued dual degrees in Commerce and Law from Gujarat National Law University and a Masters in Global affairs from Schwarzman college at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He has authored multiple seminal works at University of Cambridge and is currently assisting United Nations Development Program (UNDP) on vaccine equity in underdeveloped regions. He is currently pursuing postgraduate education in law at Oxford University, UK. In this piece, he shares his life’s story, how higher education gave him greater opportunities and his thoughts on reducing income inequality through inclusive fin-tech regulations.
You pursued a graduate program at GNLU for five years. What motivated you to pursue law?
I would say the seed was sown in my early childhood. When I was young, I saw my father’s business shut down due to financial constraints and my mother, who was a teacher, used to grind it out for 16 to 17 hours on a daily basis to provide for the family. That gave me an understanding about the value of hardwork and hardship. I matured at a young age in that sense. My experiences learning about inequalities and the desire of upward mobility always made me question their nature, and its arbitrariness. I thought the social model in which the rich kept getting richer and the poor poorer was quite flawed. Thus, I sought law as a means to address and alleviate these income irregularities.
You struck an effective balance between work and studies. Tell us how you managed to focus despite such a demanding schedule?
When I went to college to study law, I used to freelance for companies. It wasn't warranted, but I felt that it was important for me to gain some form of financial maturity and independence. Planning in advance gave me clarity and the confidence to do everything from studying, to writing, to doing other chores within the time frames. Since I did everything in a time-boxed manner, I had control over my schedule and didn't feel astray.
Paul Palmer once said, ‘the work before the work of social change’. There is inner work that needs to be done to do good work in the world. Hence, the needs ‘in here’ and the need ‘out there’ are closely intertwined. While professional and academic pursuits are important, staying connected to the community and friends as well as an occasional exercise in doing ‘nothing’ helps to focus as well.
You became a Rhodes and then a Schwarzman scholar within the span of a few hours! What was your initial reaction and how did you pursue both?
It felt surreal. I still recall that my name was announced (I think second on the list) of five people for the Rhodes from Indian constituency, after the Schwarzman selection email which preceded a few hours before. My initial reaction was to look up and thank the Almighty for blessing me with this opportunity. To realise a dream come true in a span of hours was beyond my wildest expectation. This followed with a stark realisation of the privilege and the immense responsibility it entailed.
Since the two scholarships are granted on a non-deferral basis, a big challenge was to choose one. However, both were aligned to my choice of studies - to explore the intersection of law, finance and technology and how regulatory models could be developed that could bridge the poverty-inequality gap.
Although I wanted to study this from a legal perspective by pursuing a PhD in law at Oxford, Schwarzman provided an opportunity in equal measure from a more practical perspective. In 2020, China lifted almost 800 million people out of poverty, and I felt I need to be there and see how that happened. As Steve Schwarzman says, Schwarzman Scholars get a ‘ front seat understanding of such things.’
I remember Steven Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone Group and the founding trustee of the Schwarzman Scholars programme, called me on the day of the announcement to extend his congratulations and motivated me to consider pursuing the Schwarzman.
These were two great opportunities—I couldn’t let them go. I put a deferral request for the Rhodes, to pursue the chance to go to China and pursue the Schwarzman program.
It is extremely rare to award deferrals, usually granted strictly for health reasons. To my surprise however, the (Rhodes) Trust supported the idea that studying ‘models of poverty alleviation’ at the ground level in China would complement doctoral study at Oxford.
How was the experience at Beijing’s Tsinghua University?
It was an eye-opening experience. Although my Mandarin was not that great initially, I managed to get along. For my thesis, I collaborated with four other students in three continents on a study of the rural revitalisation landscape in China. The tech-giant Alibaba gave us access to a one-of-a-kind dataset that helped us explore how the Chinese economic model was successful in alleviating poverty, which helped us develop models that could be employed in the global south to reduce the inequality gap.
What are your thoughts on cross-cultural studies? Stephen Fry once said that real education takes place outside classrooms in interactions with friends and such people. Do you agree?
Indeed, in fact, having been brought up in different regions of India, I feel I have been on a learning journey since my childhood. I was born and brought up in Nagpur but did my undergraduate studies in Ahmedabad. I also used to intern frequently in regions with diverse linguistic and cultural preferences and eventually started acclimatizing to their local norms, including at times, picking up their language and food habits.
In China, I was exposed to a culture which truly opened up myriad boundaries of knowledge. It zoomed me out from my constricted view of the world and showed me how people - who were as human as those with whom I ‘knew’ and interacted with all my life – were leading a completely different lifestyle with unique customs, habits and traditions that I was unaware of. I felt compelled to explore.
Initially, like I said, I didn’t know Mandarin at all. There were times when I used to point to the pictures in the hotel just to make them understand what food I wanted to order. Those were the initial struggles, but as I eventually caught up with the language and interacted with my Chinese friends, thesis instructors and advisers, I realised that I had so much to learn, experiences which you can't really ‘study’.
This made me realise the power of community - interacting with people from distinct languages, beliefs and cultures who, surprisingly, shared similar values was a wonderful lesson for life. I believe such experiences broadens your horizons and is indeed one of the most remarkable ways to educate oneself.
You have said in one of your previous interviews that you would like to work on regulatory models to help reduce the income inequality gap. Can you explain how you plan to go about doing this?
All across the world and particularly in India, there is a rising poverty, in both social and economic terms. While invisible, poverty has a number of spillover effects which permeates education, social justice and contributes to increasing inequality. I believe a primary cause of this problem is a lack of understanding of financial structures and regimes that shape policies and regulations in this domain. Coupled with the increasing technological disruptions that are effectively penetrating use of finance, regulations often play the role of stifling innovation and hence, it is important to study the long-term effects of how this intersection between law, finance and technology works. I hope to bring together these distinct fields in exploring alternate solutions to broader issues like poverty and inequality.
One of the things I worked on when I was in China was studying those regulatory models which enabled communities in rural areas to empower themselves. We found that previously most of the MSME sector in China faced barriers in identifying and delivering to the mainstream market. The Chinese miracle has took advantage of emerging technologies and connected the rural communities to the mainstream.
I think this is somewhat relevant in the Indian context as well. We have many indigenous communities that create handicraft products, and it is unfortunate that a lot of those products do not go to the mainstream market. Several contributing factors, including lack of access to credit, facilitative regulatory interventions and logistical barriers do not really empower them, or create an enabling environment which can assist them.
Similarly, the delivery system and the transportation infrastructure need to facilitate efficient last man delivery so that the small-scale service provider gets their fair share of the profit and do not end up become a prey of the profiteering middle men.
Being a student of law and economics, I find that an understanding of principles of finance and role of economic analysis of law in shaping effective policies can help to frame regulations which can encourage innovation and reduce inequalities.
[so, basically you want to bring technology to the grassroots… ]
Yes. Exactly. My research focuses on regulatory innovation, specifically in governance of new technologies which can ‘reinvent the wheel’ and supplement existing systems tackling poverty.
As a role model for tomorrow’s generation, what would you like them to know?
I don't feel that I am equipped to be a role model for anyone at this point. My short message is that all of us hold exceptional talents within us, which may or may not go unnoticed. Identifying your true potential is a journey laced with several trial and errors, but it is also the journey of immense personal development, one that is worth pursuing.
I feel based on my experiences that there are opportunities that are always within your grasp. The only thing that matters is how hard you work. Lastly, enjoy the process! Don’t let the contours of the degree define your learning, potential or your limits. Success is a very subjective term, developing personal bonds and immersing in meaningful conversations and cultural exchanges is equally, and perhaps, more important.
