India’s brain-drain

A few weeks back an Indian-born techie was replaced as the CEO of Twitter. Around the same time, another Indian-born economist was promoted as the first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). They both have added their names to the growing list of Indians serving in prominent global organisations at top positions. Many Indians celebrated their achievements, while many debated them. How does this success help India? Do these individuals build brand India or do they represent the lost Indian talent?

According to the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs, since 2015 more than 800,000 Indians have given up their citizenship and since 2014 more than 23,000 millionaires have left India. In fact, India ranks number one when it comes to the migration of the rich and the educated. It accounts for a cosmic 65 per cent of the global share, way ahead of China and the Philippines — the two next on this list.

For the second-most populous country in the world, exporting talent — something that it has in abundance — should not be a big deal given the belief that ‘the world is one family,’ which is also an ancient tenet of Indian philosophy. Yet, it raises the question that is this limiting the innovative capacity of India? Is it hurting the Indian economic growth?

In the 1970s, before globalisation became the common currency, brain drain used to be the buzzword in India. What is brain-drain? The loss of human capital. An expression that refers to the flight of skilled labour from developing countries to the developed world. This happens mostly due to conflict, political instability and lack of opportunity or health concerns. For decades, the west has benefitted from this brain gain.

During the 1970s, Indians graduated from the top institutes only to find jobs at home which were not financially attractive. So, they started leaving India to make the most of their degrees and skills. And unlike the short-term contract workers to Gulf nations, most of these Indians never returned. They ended up as prominent bankers, entrepreneurs, innovators and scholars abroad — in the Western World. This was at a time when India needed such professionals the most. It was still a poor post-colonial country and the exodus of its best and the brightest diminished India’s growth prospects.

The economic liberalisation of 1991 changed things. Higher education institutions cropped up as did several multinational companies. Foreign investments began flowing in as did long-departed Indians. The economic bonanza of the 1990s was largely due to this return of the diaspora. Indians who had left the country came back along with capital information, ideas and networks. According to the Reserve Bank of India, remittances flew up from $2.1 billion to $15 billion in 2000. All of this powered the economic boom.

The trend lasted only for a few years. In 1997, seven million were living and working outside India, as of 2019, before the Covid-19 hits, the figure is closing to 20 million. This raises a serious question: what made them leave the country again when the economic situation was getting better. The India of 1970 was economically much weaker than the India of the 21st century. As highlighted, the number of Indians giving up citizenship skyrocketed since 2015. What exactly happened to India around 2015?  Well, the answer is Narendra Modi.

Since Modi has gotten in power, India ranks 140 out of 180 in the World Press Freedom, while the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has recommended placing the country on a religious freedom blacklist consecutively for the past couple of years. Students have little confidence in the education system of their own country as more than half of top-rankers in classes 10 and 12 leave India for higher studies. The health system is also in a sorry state as Covid-19 exposed it. The cut-off days for non-resident Indians (NRIs) to determine their residency status was reduced to 120 days, resulting in massive disassociation from citizenship. India’s high individual tax rates make the domestic markets unattractive for businessmen, while social security and quality of life are no way near the world’s best. Last. but not least: Gender inequality widened to 65 per cent in 2021, which makes a lot of highly skilled women shift abroad with no intention to return.

Since coming to power in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made outreach to the far-flung diaspora a signature element of his government’s foreign policy. Modi’s courtship of the diaspora has been noticeable, especially in the United States, where the Indian-American population has swelled to more than four million and has become the second-largest immigrant group.

In two separate, large rallies on the US soil — 2014 and 2019 — Modi sought to highlight the achievements of the diaspora, outlining the many ways in which they can support India’s interests from afar while underscoring their increasingly substantial economic, political, and social influence in the United States.

These high-octane gatherings, however, naturally lead to a question as to why these Indians living overseas not returning to India even when their prime minister asks them to return as he did at the Madison Square Garden in 2014. They have only restricted themselves to breezy holiday trips to the country. In fact, Covid-19 has made the case worse for Modi as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government previously used to blame the Cess for every failure.

Why would an Indian abroad would choose to return when by living abroad, they can access the public sphere on their own terms, they have the option of another experiential life, of material comfort, rule of law and individual freedom, while those at home are stuck with the bigotry, inefficiency and the daily political circus.

The BJP is taking India in the opposite direction. It is instinctively anti-intellectual, it has not upheld scientific spirit much in the public proclamation, and it treats its best universities and dissenting students as enemies of the state. It does not want foundational concepts for political order, such as democracy, secularism and federalism to be taught in schools.

It is, in short, committed to the closing of the Indian mind. Liberals at home have been shouting from rooftops about the importance of secular values for the future of India. Perhaps those returning from abroad, those who have had a taste of these in the West, will have better luck convincing the government. The diaspora has been rather agnostic about rising illiberalism in India while benefiting from cosmopolitanism in the West. It won’t have the luxury of that double vision now and will need to make the connection between liberalism and the alluring dimensions of Western life that it values.

According to the Wire, India has always had economic refugees, and Indians went where they could find jobs (in West Asia and Singapore), or a better education that would underwrite good careers. Many have done brilliantly at leading global tech giants and winning Nobel prizes. But there is a darker side to the story. It seems to have become a less attractive country in which to live and work.

Businessmen, including some with recognisable names and faces, are becoming “overseas citizens”. They are investing more in other markets where life is simpler. Wealthy professionals with internationally marketable skills and degrees are also taking their money with them (prompting the finance minister in her Budget to introduce a tax on such money transfers). They may be fleeing tax terrorism, prodded by more limited economic opportunities than they had imagined, or simply keeping one foot in India and another overseas because public discourse here has acquired a nasty edge and who knows what’s coming next. Or perhaps it is just the air quality in Indian cities which is a deterrent. Whatever the reason, the economic refugees of old have been replaced by well-placed people leaving India’s unattractive political economy. Diplomats from under-populated countries like Australia and Canada report a sudden increase in the number of Indians seeking to emigrate.

India has to pay a huge cost for people leaving India. Those leaving end up contributing more to the host country than to their home country. According to the associated chambers of commerce and industry, Indian students studying abroad cost India as much as 17 billion dollars a year in lost revenues. When they leave India, they are in the most productive phase of their lives, by the time they return, that is assuming that they do return, they are often a spent force with ideas and skills that are no longer required. This apparently leads to reduced economic growth, limited innovative capacities of the nation and lack of skilled manpower.

According to the US national center for biotechnology information, India is the world’s biggest exporter of doctors. There is one Indian doctor in the United States for every 1,325 Americans but there’s one doctor in India for more than 2,400 people which is a disturbing statistic from an Indian point of view.

India is losing its doctors, engineers and entrepreneurs to other countries. It’s losing much of its skilled human capital to other countries. Why is it that rich families with roaring businesses want to acquire investor green cards?  Why do an IT employee pay night and day to earn that H-1B visa? Why does an Indian student want to go abroad directly after school? Who do Indian-born innovators disassociate themselves from their birthplace?

The answer to the problem comes down to the actions and policies of the Modi-led BJP government. Indian voters need to question their choice if they want to stop non-residential Indians from becoming non-returning Indians.

(The writer is a staff member of BOL News. Views expressed by him are his own and do not reflect the newspaper’s policy)