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Showing posts with label Brain Drain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brain Drain. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 06, 2015

Brain Drain To Brain Gain


As India extends beyond geographical borders, barriers with NRIs have fallen
Over the past week, we've witnessed anot her breathless public display of affection between Prime Mini ster Narendra Modi and the NRI community . Reproached for years as a self-serving people who deserted the motherland for their own ends, the community is now increasingly feted as proud sons and daughters of India.Censured for having first taken the benefit of subsidised Indian education and then participated in a massive Brain Drain from the country , they are now heralded as the creators of a `Brain Gain' that will power India into a glorious technology-studded future.
It's interesting to observe how our attitudes towards our expatriate brethren have transformed over the past decade or two. Remember Bollywood's portrayal of the NRI of the 60s in films like Purab aur Paschim, where westernised Indian girls chain smoked, and moms who should have been slaving away on sewing machines to pay for their son's education wasted away their hours in swimming pool parties? Clearly , as these ingrates abandoned our shores, they exchanged the virtuous Indian way of life for the materialistic, decadent values of the West.
The 90s witnessed, through films like Dilwale Dulhania and Aa Ab Laut Chalen, an attempt to understand the community and empathise with its dual pressures of blending in with the host country while still staying true to its Indian values. The vastly more sympathetic portrayal, prompted in part by the desire to garner a world market for these films, also reflected changing domestic attitudes towards the community .
Over the last decade, the relationship has entered a whole new chapter. That earlier sense of overseas Indians being a distinct group, separated physically and culturally from the motherland is gone.Far from passing any value judgment on them, films now tend to effortlessly include overseas Indians in the narrative, depicting them as desirable, confident, globetrotting role models.
How has this sea change in attitudes taken place? At a basic level, our seamless acceptance of Indians abroad has been paved by a general change in our attitudes towards money and success. As socialist ideas have given way to market-driven ones and the pursuit of material success is seen as a legitimate goal, the prospect of Indians seeking out their fame and fortune beyond Indian shores hardly seems suspect.
On the contrary , the success of Indians abroad is now triumphantly viewed as a reverse colonialism of sorts.India may have thrown off the yoke of foreign rule in a physical sense seven decades ago, but we are still to fully throw off the yoke emotionally .
Each new announcement of an Indian being appointed to the helm of a leading global company , feels like sweet revenge against two centuries of subjugation. The Indian diaspora spread across the capitals of the world and increasingly making its presence felt there, seems akin to an advance party of a civilisatio nal army set to conquer the word.
In terms of hard economic and political benefits too, the contribution of expat Indians is equally gratifying. India is the world's top recipient of remittances, even though the Indian diaspora is not the largest in the world (China's is more than twice as large) ­ suggesting a greater degree of emotional and cultural connectivity with the homeland. At over $70 billion per annum, the value of remittances from overseas is just 25% less than the Indian government's entire annual Plan Expenditure of $94 billion! The Indian IT boom also owes substantially to the reputation that Indians settled in Silicon Valley have made for themselves as geeks and innovators ­ a prowess celebrated in American popular culture through characters like Asok of the Dilbert comic strip and Raj of Big Bang Theory . This perception has allowed us to steadily move up the IT value chain, from body-shopping in the 80s and 90s to vanilla IT assignments like Y2K, to IT consultancy and new idea centric start-ups making waves globally .
No wonder, then, that concepts like Brain Drain seem so out of sync with the times. As PM Modi rightly observed, the diaspora today seems like a brains trust which can offer a whole lot more gain for the country .
Like in any relationship on the mend, the NRI's view of the homeland also seems to have undergone a sea change in the past decades. A generation ago, the NRI shared a complex love-hate relationship with his motherland, comprising both guilt and a deep resentment of the conditions back home that forced him to leave. Shashi Tharoor described the relationship thus, in a book published in 1997: The attitude of the expatriate to his homeland is like that of the faithless lover who blames the woman he has spurned for not having merited his fidelity .
However, with India progressively offering new opportunities after liberalisation, and the West slowing down (precipitously so, after the global financial crisis) we're witnessing a healthy two-way flow of talent.
Indian expats now find it much easier to return to the country , with a shrinking differential in salaries and nearglobal living standards in secluded enclaves in our metros. Conversely Indians today happily explore opportunities overseas without any guilt that they may be seen as deserting the motherland.
Finally , India seems to be extending beyond its physical borders. The tagline India Everywhere used prematurely by a dotcom brand 15 years ago, seems finally to be coming true.
The writer is Executive President, Bennett, Coleman & Company Limited (BCCL)

Source: Times of India, 6-10-2015

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Jun 11 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)
SECOND OPINION - What a waste


India's undiscovered youthful talent goes abegging in foreign lands
In a piazza, in the historic centre of Rome, a man in the saffron robes of a yogi held a four-foot high pole on which another saffron-clad yogi sat with perfect balance. It was an amazing act, worthy of any circus. Here it was being performed for the small change passers-by might chose to throw into the box in front of the two yogis.All over Rome, there were young men from the Indian subcontinent earning a precarious livelihood by being streetside performers, or selling tacky souvenirs. Most were illegal immigrants, keeping a wary eye out for the police.
Almost anywhere you go in the world you will find young Indian men, on the fringe of the underworld, economic refugees in an alien land so remote in every sense from their home. To survive they must learn foreign languages, keep out of reach of the long arm of the law, and hone a variety of skills to earn whatever they can, however they can.
Financial desperation compels them to leave home and family to seek whatever scant and chancy fortune they might find in a distant and inhospitable clime. Unlike the contract workers who go to the Gulf, and earn enough to send remittances home, these gypsy-like vagabonds who swarm all over Europe and Southeast Asia have no regular jobs or source of income; they live on the edge, with no scope for savings.
We talk about the `brain drain' which depletes India of educated profes sionals like doctors and computer buffs who go to live abroad to better their prospects.
This represents a huge loss for the country in terms of trained human resources. Few, if any, compute the loss to the country repre sented by the unrecorded, and often illegal, flight of unskilled emigrants ­ sometimes referred to as `kabutars', or pigeons ­ who are forced by brute economic necessity to flee to foreign shores, more often than not with the untrustworthy help of unscrupulous touts and racketeers who exploit and fleece them before abandoning them to their hazardous fate.
The ability to survive against the odds, often in a hostile environment, is proof of the innate aptitudes, the `street smarts', that these self-willed exiles must possess. Properly harnessed, the talents that so many of them display could be put to use for the benefit of their home country .
The elections have witnessed an induction of more than 150 million firsttime voters. The greatest challenge that the new government faces is to devise ways and means to put to productive use this collective energy which could transform the country , economically and socially .
The solution lies not in the creation of yet more sarkari jobs and adding to an already bloated bureaucracy . The answer lies in out-of-the-box thinking: micro-financing grassroots entrepreneurs, encouraging self-employment through vocational training, creating sources of productive livelihood instead of creating unproductive government jobs.
Unless this is done, millions of India's `kabutars' will continue to fly out of the country to far-off lands, to perform tricks and sell trinkets and live on the uncertain kindness of foreign strangers, living evidence of India's begging bowl.
secondopinion@timesgroup.com http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/jugglebandhi/