Talent migration has now come full circle

By the time India liberalised in 1991, many of those who had migrated in the 1970s and the 1980s had either reached top management positions in American technology firms or had turned entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. They became India’s brand ambassadors and drove investments from their parent companies or invested themselves. Three decades later, every Fortune 500 company does R&D in India.

Path-breaking: The IITs at Madras, Kharagpur and Bombay had international faculty in their early years. PTI

Dinesh C Sharma

Science commentator

A few decades ago, PV Indiresan, former director of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, had commented that ‘when a student enrols at an IIT, his spirit is said to ascend to America. After graduation, his body follows.’ He was only repeating an oft-quoted joke that referred to the trend in the 1970s and the 1980s of a large number of IIT graduates migrating to the US for higher studies and staying on there for jobs in the corporate sector or academia. The phenomenon was dubbed ‘brain drain’ in the 1960s. The recent appointment of Parag Agrawal, a graduate of IIT Bombay, as the Chief Executive Officer of Twitter, has revived the debate on ‘brain drain’ and about how elite institutions are still exporting their talent to America. It is also being argued that the achievements of those who stay back need to be celebrated and not of those who migrate. Such debate on the so-called ‘brain drain’ is fallacious and parochial, ignoring both the historical perspective and the 21st century dynamics of a globalised knowledge economy.

The America-attraction of Indian techies is not new. It goes back to the late 19th century when the then newly-established Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) began attracting attention among nationalist leaders as well as industrialists in India. While a large number of Indians went to Britain for higher education and technical training, the nationalists saw MIT as an alternative model for industry-oriented tech education. The newspapers edited by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, while arguing for technical education and industrialisation in India, projected MIT as the Model Institute of Technology. No wonder, early Indians to go to MIT were from Poona, Bombay, Bhavnagar and other cities in western India, resulting in the founding of engineering industries in the region, as documented by the historian of technology Ross Bassett. MIT was formally proposed as a model for higher technical education in India in the report of the Nalini Ranjan Sarkar Committee in March 1946.

Though the blueprint of Sarkar committee became the basis for setting up IITs, MIT was still not directly involved in establishing IITs at Kharagpur, Bombay and Madras in the 1950s. All of them, however, had international faculty in their formative years. It was the IIT at Kanpur that had the direct participation of MIT-led consortium of American institutions. Dozens of American professors taught at Kanpur, large equipment like mainframe computers and small planes were brought from America and students had access to American scientific journals, as part of the 10-year Kanpur India America Project (KIAP). Since post-graduation and doctoral studies in engineering were still unavailable in IITs, a number of their graduates migrated to American universities whose professors had taught them in India. It was also the time when the American government changed its immigration rules. Graduates from IITs were found overqualified or ill-suited for absorption in family-run industrial houses in India. All these factors resulted in the first wave of migration and ‘brain drain’.

Migration of Indian talent is made to sound as if it is a dead-end and one-way street. It is not so. Even as ‘brain drain’ was becoming a concern among the Indian scientific establishment and policy-makers, bright Indians had started returning and catalysing new ventures in India. It was MIT graduate Lalit Kanodia, who along with Nitin Patel and Ashok Malhotra (also from MIT), in 1966 wrote the project report for a computer centre for the Tatas which eventually took the shape of the Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). Another IITian with engineering and management degrees from the MIT, Narendra Patni, saw a business opportunity in farming data conversion business to India — giving birth to the idea of outsourcing. IIT Kanpur graduate, Prabhu Goel, set up a branch of his chip designing firm in Noida in mid-1980s. The Noida unit became a part of Cadence when Goel’s firm got acquired in America. This was the beginning of silicon design business in India. In the same way, Texas Instrument’s decision to come to India was influenced by the hard work and talent of Indians who were working in the firm in America. The early success of Cadence and TI attracted almost every major chip developer to set shop in India.

By the time India liberalised in 1991, many of those who had migrated in the 1970s and the 1980s had either reached top management positions in American technology firms or had turned entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. They became India’s brand ambassadors and drove investments from their parent companies or invested themselves. This happened not just in information technology sector, but also in biotechnology, healthcare and so on. GE saw the opportunity and made India a part of its global R&D system. Three decades later, every Fortune 500 company does R&D in India. The software, IT and engineering services industry is worth nearly 200 billion dollars.

The trend has continued in several areas including academia and scientific research. We are seeing greater collaborative research between the Indians working in foreign universities and here. Indian scientists are in top positions in mega science projects like Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in which Indian institutions are participating in a big way. All such collaboration helps in the exchange of knowledge, capacity development and also leads to new businesses and industrial activity. The new start-ups in the aerospace sector are a prime example of such cross-country linkages.

As eminent scientist RA Mashelkar often says, what we are seeing is not ‘brain drain’ but ‘brain gain’ and ‘brain circulation’. Every Indian appointed as CEO of a global tech company speaks volumes about India’s higher education system. It is also a reflection of the system in which talent and merit are recognised, irrespective of one’s race, religion or country of origin. If we are able to create similar opportunities in our universities, businesses and start-up ecosystem, we should not only be able to retain top brains — which we are doing to a great extent — but also attract talent from other parts of the world.