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August 9, 2000

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The great Indian brain exodus

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Prasanti Rao

On a hot and humid Sunday in December 1995, I sat with my maternal uncle, a doctor and the Resident Medical Officer of Osmania Hospital, Secunderbad, (a city that borders Hyderbad, India's new cyber capital) on the streets of Madras amidst 25 genteel IIT students in front of 300 other educated Indians in line for a US visa.

In front of us, women with bunches of jasmine in their oily plaited hair and wearing richly colored heavy saris with their lightly dressed men in white, cars, cows, scrawny kids and auto-rickshaws passed by. Observing the resigned patience of everyone waiting, I was relatively eager unlike my fellow companions to tell the US Consul the next morning that was unfair to let people queue up this way for hours.

Nevertheless, I felt totally disconnected to the masses huddled around me. Having lived outside of India most of my life, my major thoughts revolved around my only other experience of sitting on a street: in front of an Indian embassy in Iraq hoping to get out of the Gulf war. I was hoping to run away from India as well, tired of being stuck in a boring orthodox Brahmin society that did not allow me do anything or go anywhere (except study to become a doctor) because I was a girl.

When I went inside, the American lady at the booth thanked for my comments about the queue. She didn't know that people were waiting for so long and promised to do something about it. She processed my visa without asking any questions. I smiled, relieved that I could leave Madras and study in country that would give me the freedom to do as I please. My comrades of the night, the IITians got their visas and with happy shouts disappeared into the ether.

The US did give me a new freedom. American professors in a small Midwestern Catholic school, relying on Sartre's ideas of individual freedom, Plato's 'forms' and the Upanishads teaching of following one's own Dharma convinced me of my freedom to choose my own path in life and help people. I succeeded in breaking away from my family's expectations of becoming a doctor. Thus, a liberal education and experiences in the US have prompted me to consider, to the disbelief of my family, going back to India to try and change things.

Most Indian (and other Third World) revolutionaries have treaded a similar path. The most famous is Gandhi, who left India to England to study law, discovered the Gita, and formed a vision that enabled him to walk miles, connecting India's millions to non-violent action for freedom.

Nehru, Jinnah and many other Indians came back and joined politics for the same reason -- an increased awareness of the role they needed to play for the progress of their countries' freedom.

However, since Indian Independence, more educated Indians have been migrating in large numbers to the US, Europe and the Middle East, but very few return to serve India or consider it a viable prospect. Statistics from the International Council on Education estimate that around 50 per cent of India's graduates from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), the top 20 per cent of graduates from medical schools, and the top 15 per cent of graduates in the humanities leave the country.

In addition, around 75 per cent of India's computer professionals are abandoning the country's booming computer industry for greater individual prosperity. A sizeable number of educated brides, businessmen, entertainment artistes, media entrepreneurs, writers and even a few priests follow these groups to cater to the needs of the Indian communities' abroad. Less than 10 per cent of Indians return to India.

Most Indians abroad claim that the lack of job opportunities and capital, the horrible living conditions in India, its bureaucratic and unhealthy work culture, and turbulent political economy forces them to seek opportunities abroad.

Payal Prabhu, a computer professional with AT&T says: "In a country of a billion people, of which millions of young students graduate from colleges and universities across the nation every year and are immediately tossed into the unemployment net, the best and the only option out is to remove themselves from the situation. It is most definitely the most logical thing to do."

This situation is ironic. The fact is that although we have such skilled computer professionals and a booming computer industry, there is still so much frictional unemployment, inefficient resource allocation overall coupled with a corrupt patrimonial system that educated people are unable to make ends meet in India. An earlier rediff.com article found that India's legendary software industry is desperate for IT personnel. A National Association of Software and Service Companies report has projected that India needs 1,40,000 workers for 2000-2001. India's education system produces around 85,000 workers, 36,000 of whom emigrate to the US, 10,000 each to Japan and Europe.

Diploma-granting institutes also send more "computer professionals" to the Middle East and the US. The greater irony, however, is that the Indian state, from its inception, has heavily subsidized the higher education of its best students with the hope that they may, after graduation or further study abroad, build and modernize the country and/or spread the goods of education. In other words, the educated elite of the India were to be (and still are) the keys to its renewal.

Yet, Michael Moffatt, anthropology professor at Rutgers University, who has studied Indian Diasporic Cultures in New Jersey, USA notes that: " I haven't heard much spontaneous guilt about this issue from the often-expert diasporic Indian men I've talk with in my New Jersey research. They're mostly proud of their ability to have done well in American economic circles, and to have looked after their families. How they are benefiting or damaging the Indian nation just doesn't come up much in their narratives of their American lives."

Professor Moffatt added that he was not sure why this state of affairs exists. My theory is that there is little or no "guilt" among many Indians abroad for two reasons: First, the Indian education system from grade school to college strongly emphasizes scientific, technical or trades education. There is little or no liberal education or nation-building in process, no philosophy or social ideology that connects Indians to modern India in the public sphere of a classroom.

Most Indians gain their understanding of "Indianess" from in their personal spheres, families, communities and religion. Thus, they seem to believe that simply being Indian abroad, practising Indian cultural norms and religious rituals suffices as patriotism. In short, most Indians do not feel that they "owe' anything to India because they have not gained a sense of healthy, liberal nationalism from their education systems unlike their US or European counterparts.

An interesting sideline to this thesis is that most humanities graduates, unlike doctors or technical graduates from India, are more likely to support a compensatory tax by the Indian government for emigrating. Dr Partha Dasgupta, professor of economics at the University of Cambridge, stated this earlier in an interview: "For most liberals [the idea of a tax] is an unthinkable question. But I do not like to see it that way. If society pays for someone like me to become a doctor, and I walk off to another country, it should be compensated in some way."

Second, most Non-Resident Indians are likely to argue that there are contributing substantially, if not more, by emigrating from India. Foreign exchange via remittances and direct investment is crucial benefit for the Indian State. NRI cash flows in 1999-2000, as per the Reserve Bank of India amounted to $ 26.652 billion, and helped stabilize the country's precarious balance of payments and bring in needed foreign exchange. Indians abroad also point to the considerable prestige, recognition and sale of work by Indian scientists, social researchers and writers in other countries.

Finally, some Indian IT professionals are using their capital, networks and expertise to invest in India and thereby create a brain trust of skilled labor. Thus, Indians abroad posit that there is a definite positive side to the brain drain that should not be overlooked.

But does this positive side compensate for the loss of human capital for India? Most IIT professors, thrilled with the success and recent well-publicized monetary contributions of their 'boys' (less than five per cent of IIT grads are women) abroad, seem to think so. A prominent example of this trend is the $ 1.7 million contribution by Kanwal S Rekhi, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who is rallying fellow IITians at the behest of Prime Minster Vajpayee to collect a billion dollars for the IITs. Professor Naryana Murthy of IIT, Bombay said, "The country is getting a global outlook and if our boys can do well in other countries after graduation then it only means that we can compete with anyone in the world. It is only because of our boys that we have such a big corpus fund now."

Professor B N Patnaik of IIT, Kanpur, in an article entitled 'Rethinking the Brain Drain' adds that IIT grads may become a pressure group of respected professionals that can further India's interests. This possibility is beginning to take root in the US. A group of 33 Indian American IT professionals met with Clinton to discuss their needs and concerns before he left for his India trip this year.

Moreover, the growing base of Indian professionals such as doctors, scientists and humanities professors who emigrated mostly in the 60s and 70s, and the recent surge of IT professionals have given the 1.4-million strong Indian American community the nickname of a 'model' community. The last US census highlighted that 67 per cent of Indian Americans have college degrees and most have above-average income families.

However, Indian-Americans are an ethnic community in the US. They and other Indian communities abroad no longer actively contribute to rebuilding the Indian nation beyond monetary contributions to families back in India, the BJP (on account of its ability to market itself as a champion of Indian culture), their alma maters and investing in cheap, skilled labor.

The prestige element of work by Indians abroad applies more to the individual, community and the country he or she resides than to India. This is clearly a case with our brilliant humanities professors who enrich the academic discourse of plush Ivy League campuses in the West by enchanting students with the complexities of India's woes.

In the final analysis, such activities do not fully compensate for the India's tremendous loss of human capital due to the mass migration of its educated elite. The US, Europe and the Middle East gain far more both in terms of capital and skills. The Washington Times recently noted that Indian Americans entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, California alone made $ 60 billion.

In the short term, these Indian American entrepreneurs may add substantially to India's finances and skill pool via 'brain trusts' but, in the long term, they are more likely to contribute immensely to companies and countries where they reside and live permanently. This could be disastrous for India. The exodus of its "knowledge workers" especially in the modern world where information is increasingly equated with power will imply a further loss of valuable resources and power to acquire them.

There will also be social costs. An educated elite, particularly during the days before Independence, revived the social scene in the countryside as well as the urban cities by using Indian motifs from history, religion and philosophy to create a democratic, Indian consensus. In doing so, they created spaces where vibrant, changing climate of liberal thought and learning could flourish; for example, Tagore's university in Shantiniketan. Now, these spaces are dwindling because India's intellectuals value materialistic goods more highly and are leaving the country. Thus, the quality of life in India will decrease without the input of educated dialogue.

As I mentioned before, the educated elite was politically responsible for "creating India" by articulating the voice of India both domestically and in a global context to secure its freedom from the British. With the "brain" elite leaving India, there will be no longer the impetus or the vehicle to give a voice to the remainder of India's suffering millions who still lack the freedom to live a dignified life. What is worse is that this is a sad, deplorable state of affairs, which is accepted as normal.

I feel isolated in my desire to return to India; most people caution me about returning since things are way too difficult -- because India today is a treacherous place to live in, a place where survival itself is a pricey commodity. These fears primarily justify why they will not go back to India. And India loses more in the process. As Bertolt Brecht said in his Three Penny Opera:

"There are some who live in the light and there are those who live in the darkness. One sees those in the light while those in the darkness disappear."

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