NEW DELHI: In the early 1990s, when India’s economic liberalisation was not yet on a firm footing, an Indian official, N Vittal, told a Singaporean delegation that its country should hire more Indian engineers. One journalist asked Mr Vittal, the then secretary in the department of electronics in the Indian government, if this would not accelerate India’s brain drain. Doesn’t India need their skills? The witty Mr Vittal said: “Brain drain is better than brain in the drain.”
Singaporeans are not accustomed to government officials mocking their own government, and laughed nervously. But Mr Vittal was making a deeper point. India had a huge surplus of skilled engineers but the opportunities for them were few. They were leaving the country anyway, so it would be far better if they could be employed by reputed companies.
What Mr Vittal would not say publicly then, but Indian officials said privately later, was there will come a time when many of those who had left will return. Even if they did not return to India physically, they would become assets abroad and direct investments India’s way.
The first multinational to set up shop in Bangalore’s Electronic City was Texas Instruments, and the story goes that it did so when an American manager discovered that a large part of his research staff was from India, and many of them came from southern India.
When he asked an Indian colleague about it, the Indian colleague is supposed to have said. If you are really interested, why don’t we invest in India? Indeed, why not go to the source of that river, the company decided. Against bureaucratic hurdles, it established the first satellite-based link between an Indian operation of a multinational and its parent — in the early 1980s.
Likewise, Ramesh Vangal, an enthusiastic executive at Pepsico spent a long time convincing his management and the Indian bureaucracy to allow his company to operate in India — in the late 1980s. (He left Pepsi years later, and today runs a business that includes several services sourcing products from, or getting jobs executed in, India). There are other venture capital firms in the Silicon Valley which specialise in investing in India — run by Indian professionals who have settled in the West.
But the flow is not only financial, it is also physical. Prodigal sons and daughters have begun to return. While statistics are hard to come by, regional hotspots like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Gurgaon, New Bombay, and Pune, where those venture capital firms are investing millions of dollars, you find major investments in the ancillary infrastructure which returning Indians need to lead a comfortable life. This includes western-style shopping malls, condominium-style homes and high-rise apartments.
To be sure, many such plans are part of the wider impact of liberalisation and modernity in India; the factories being designed and homes being built are not restricted to Indians returning from abroad, and the newly prospering Indian middle class is ever-present in these surroundings.
Many Indian labourers have historically gone abroad on short stints to work in the construction sector in the Middle East. Parts of Kerala have been transformed on the strength of their remittances, and families have wiped out years of misery because one of their sons or daughters went to work in Dubai as welders, builders, nurses, or housemaids. Remittances brought $23bn to India last year, according to a World Bank study — more than aid, but less than investments).
For a long time, for those who worked in white collar professions, it seemed, there was no incentive to return. The opulent Californian lifestyle seemed hard to relinquish.
But things change. Three fundamental reasons have brought some Indian professionals back to India: a downturn in the West, family circumstances, and opportunities in India.
When the economic downturn hit Silicon Valley a couple of years ago, two popular jokes were shared widely among Indian professionals. One went: What is the latest status symbol in California? (The answer: A pay slip.) The other went: What does B2B stand for? Not business-to-business, mind you but back-to-Bangalore.
In other words, as jobs disappeared in the West, some Indians, figuring out that the next pay cheque may be uncertain, decided to cut their losses and replied to advertisements of Indian companies eager to go global and hire Indian talent with international exposure.
Family circumstances worked in two ways. In some cases, as their parents were aging, the professionals felt duty bound to live closer to them. On the other hand, as their children became teenagers, the conservative-minded among them, worried that their daughters might want to become cheerleaders, decided to move back. (Ironically, the idyllic image of submissive India that they carried from their memories was going to be shattered anyway — compared to the gyrations that pass for dance in Bollywood films these days, cheerleading is innocent fun).
But most important was the opportunity. Even though India may not rank high in the pecking order of the global economy on a per capita basis, its growth rate is higher than most large economies in the world. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service
