Where are all the smartest brains going?
Not long after graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur, Manu Agarwal left for the US holding a one-way plane ticket and little else. “At that time, in the 1990s, America was still very much the land of opportunity,” he says. “You studied at IIT, went on to a top American college and then waited for the greenback and the green card.” Agarwal first got his MS at the University of Minnesota. “It was much easier to get good grades at Minnesota U,” he says on college education in the US. “At IITs, the level of competition is an order of magnitude higher.” Having earned his stripes, Agarwal joined Wafer Scale Integration where he spent most of his time doing research on flash memory chips.
For Agarwal, though, it wasn’t exciting enough. In 1997 he returned to Mumbai to co-found Design Expo, a company whose flagship product was an instant messaging solution. “The Internet was still in its infancy in India and the IT industry was young and rapidly growing,” says Agarwal. By the second year, his company posted revenues of about $171 million, and in the fourth year hired 24 IIT graduates, which probably is a world record!
The return journey wasn’t accidental. For Agarwal the plan to come back to India was always on the agenda. There were a number of reasons for going home. “Chiefly it was the desire to be more creative and productive in India and to come back to people I knew,” he says.
Make space, ladies and gentlemen, the brains are coming back! According to a survey by global analytical and research firm Evalueserve, India’s top graduates believe the country is fast catching up with the US for the range and quality of career prospects. Soak up these figures: Over 30 per cent of IITians who graduated during 1964 and 2001 moved to the US whereas only 9 per cent did so during 2002 and 2008. The drop in the number of IITians who believe the US offered a “better standard of living” has been remarkable, from 13 per cent to almost zero. It’s a far cry from those days when IIT Chennai was considered America’s 51st state.
So why do increasing numbers of Indian graduates prefer the rupee to the once mighty dollar? Engineers and recruiters cite a raft of reasons for the reverse migration, from rising living standards in India to a sense among some Indian youth that it’s time to give back something to the communities that educated them.
Some of those who left say they are getting involved in India now because they have succeeded as entrepreneurs and have money to spare, because there are economic opportunities in India and because the country is more open to their participation in its affairs. Pradeep Singh from Delhi made his millions from his stock options at Microsoft. He quit in the mid-1990s to start his own company, Aditi, which provides customer service via e-mail from India for corporations abroad. He now has two companies, lives four months a year in Bangalore and eight in Seattle, and employs 1000 people – half of them in India.
And there’s Rakesh Mathur from Mumbai. He and two other Indians, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, founded a Silicon Valley company, Junglee.com – an early comparison-shopping engine on the Web. It was sold in 1998 to Amazon.com in a stock deal that made Mathur $90 million richer. He still has homes in California and Seattle, but he also has one in Pune. Mathur’s new company, now called Stratify, has offices in Bangalore and Mountain View.
Indian innovation is a big draw. Earlier, it used to be a struggle to get good work in India. US companies would transfer components of the products and get bugs fixed. Someone abroad always decided what to do. Now this has changed. Complete products are being developed there. By some estimates, there are more IT engineers in Bangalore (250,000) than in Silicon Valley (200,000). Meta Group believes at least one-third of new IT development work for big US companies is done overseas, with India the biggest site. And India could start grabbing jobs from other sectors. US governments are increasingly using India to manage everything from accounting to their food-stamp programmes. Auto engineering and drug research are moving to India. Even the US Postal Service is taking work there. That growth is inspiring more of the best and brightest to stay home rather than migrate.
Also, in a post 9/11 world, stringent visa regulations severely hinder free movement of labour. (Actor Neil Nitin Mukesh, to take just one odd example, was stopped by US immigration officers simply because he was considered too “white” to be Indian.) How many knowledge workers have been subjected to such humiliation is not known, but not many are keen to experience it firsthand. They'd rather stay home.
What, however, is less openly discussed is that the rise of the Indian knowledge worker is terrifying Westerners. While many see India’s digital workers as bearers of new prosperity to a deserving nation and vital partners of the West, others see them as shock troops in the final assault on high-paying jobs. Declining Western economies now want to firewall high-paying jobs from immigrants. Last year, a mid-level employee in Britain’s immigration department quit when he was asked by his seniors to junk applications from India and increase intake from Eastern Europe.
Indians employed in the US can feel the backlash. “There is a great deal of resentment in American workplaces; racial outbursts are common,” says a techie who works in Fremont-based AMD Corp. The upshot: at any given time 70 per cent of Indians are considering returning home.
Another major factor is that in an era when travel and communication are getting quicker and easier, the linear idea of a one-way brain drain is giving way to a different paradigm of brains that circulate between native and adopted countries. You don’t really have to be physically present in, say, Silicon Valley to work there. Says Agarwal: “Often it doesn’t make any difference where you are located. We have good engineers here. And, the Internet being in place, sharing information and getting to know about the latest technologies is not difficult.”
In a globalising economy, exposure in India’s diverse marketplace has become a necessity. Says Harish Krishna Simha, an engineer from Russia’s elite Voronezh State Technological Academy, and now works with the multinational Cobra Breweries in Mumbai: “Where it once was a great asset to boast Western experience, now everyone works in India for at least a few years. If you haven’t done it, it can actually be a problem for career development.”
Of course, India can, and does, get under your skin. Often these overachievers are appalled by stifling bureaucracy, stonewalling politicians, slow traffic, and outdated ideas – the detritus from the past. But they are prepared for the worst. “I didn’t face many disappointments,” says IIT Kanpur graduate Ranjan Bose, Agarwal’s former partner in Design Expo. “I had a realistic picture in mind. I was prepared for the worst... let’s just say my expectations were low. If you are well organised, you won’t face too many problems, except perhaps when dealing with the government.”
As things improve in India the trend is clear: in the minds of India’s graduates, the West is no longer best.
--
Rakesh Krishnan is a features writer with Fairfax New Zealand. He has previously worked with Businessworld, India Today and Hindustan Times, and was news editor with the Financial Express.
Not long after graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur, Manu Agarwal left for the US holding a one-way plane ticket and little else. “At that time, in the 1990s, America was still very much the land of opportunity,” he says. “You studied at IIT, went on to a top American college...
Not long after graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur, Manu Agarwal left for the US holding a one-way plane ticket and little else. “At that time, in the 1990s, America was still very much the land of opportunity,” he says. “You studied at IIT, went on to a top American college and then waited for the greenback and the green card.” Agarwal first got his MS at the University of Minnesota. “It was much easier to get good grades at Minnesota U,” he says on college education in the US. “At IITs, the level of competition is an order of magnitude higher.” Having earned his stripes, Agarwal joined Wafer Scale Integration where he spent most of his time doing research on flash memory chips.
For Agarwal, though, it wasn’t exciting enough. In 1997 he returned to Mumbai to co-found Design Expo, a company whose flagship product was an instant messaging solution. “The Internet was still in its infancy in India and the IT industry was young and rapidly growing,” says Agarwal. By the second year, his company posted revenues of about $171 million, and in the fourth year hired 24 IIT graduates, which probably is a world record!
The return journey wasn’t accidental. For Agarwal the plan to come back to India was always on the agenda. There were a number of reasons for going home. “Chiefly it was the desire to be more creative and productive in India and to come back to people I knew,” he says.
Make space, ladies and gentlemen, the brains are coming back! According to a survey by global analytical and research firm Evalueserve, India’s top graduates believe the country is fast catching up with the US for the range and quality of career prospects. Soak up these figures: Over 30 per cent of IITians who graduated during 1964 and 2001 moved to the US whereas only 9 per cent did so during 2002 and 2008. The drop in the number of IITians who believe the US offered a “better standard of living” has been remarkable, from 13 per cent to almost zero. It’s a far cry from those days when IIT Chennai was considered America’s 51st state.
So why do increasing numbers of Indian graduates prefer the rupee to the once mighty dollar? Engineers and recruiters cite a raft of reasons for the reverse migration, from rising living standards in India to a sense among some Indian youth that it’s time to give back something to the communities that educated them.
Some of those who left say they are getting involved in India now because they have succeeded as entrepreneurs and have money to spare, because there are economic opportunities in India and because the country is more open to their participation in its affairs. Pradeep Singh from Delhi made his millions from his stock options at Microsoft. He quit in the mid-1990s to start his own company, Aditi, which provides customer service via e-mail from India for corporations abroad. He now has two companies, lives four months a year in Bangalore and eight in Seattle, and employs 1000 people – half of them in India.
And there’s Rakesh Mathur from Mumbai. He and two other Indians, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, founded a Silicon Valley company, Junglee.com – an early comparison-shopping engine on the Web. It was sold in 1998 to Amazon.com in a stock deal that made Mathur $90 million richer. He still has homes in California and Seattle, but he also has one in Pune. Mathur’s new company, now called Stratify, has offices in Bangalore and Mountain View.
Indian innovation is a big draw. Earlier, it used to be a struggle to get good work in India. US companies would transfer components of the products and get bugs fixed. Someone abroad always decided what to do. Now this has changed. Complete products are being developed there. By some estimates, there are more IT engineers in Bangalore (250,000) than in Silicon Valley (200,000). Meta Group believes at least one-third of new IT development work for big US companies is done overseas, with India the biggest site. And India could start grabbing jobs from other sectors. US governments are increasingly using India to manage everything from accounting to their food-stamp programmes. Auto engineering and drug research are moving to India. Even the US Postal Service is taking work there. That growth is inspiring more of the best and brightest to stay home rather than migrate.
Also, in a post 9/11 world, stringent visa regulations severely hinder free movement of labour. (Actor Neil Nitin Mukesh, to take just one odd example, was stopped by US immigration officers simply because he was considered too “white” to be Indian.) How many knowledge workers have been subjected to such humiliation is not known, but not many are keen to experience it firsthand. They'd rather stay home.
What, however, is less openly discussed is that the rise of the Indian knowledge worker is terrifying Westerners. While many see India’s digital workers as bearers of new prosperity to a deserving nation and vital partners of the West, others see them as shock troops in the final assault on high-paying jobs. Declining Western economies now want to firewall high-paying jobs from immigrants. Last year, a mid-level employee in Britain’s immigration department quit when he was asked by his seniors to junk applications from India and increase intake from Eastern Europe.
Indians employed in the US can feel the backlash. “There is a great deal of resentment in American workplaces; racial outbursts are common,” says a techie who works in Fremont-based AMD Corp. The upshot: at any given time 70 per cent of Indians are considering returning home.
Another major factor is that in an era when travel and communication are getting quicker and easier, the linear idea of a one-way brain drain is giving way to a different paradigm of brains that circulate between native and adopted countries. You don’t really have to be physically present in, say, Silicon Valley to work there. Says Agarwal: “Often it doesn’t make any difference where you are located. We have good engineers here. And, the Internet being in place, sharing information and getting to know about the latest technologies is not difficult.”
In a globalising economy, exposure in India’s diverse marketplace has become a necessity. Says Harish Krishna Simha, an engineer from Russia’s elite Voronezh State Technological Academy, and now works with the multinational Cobra Breweries in Mumbai: “Where it once was a great asset to boast Western experience, now everyone works in India for at least a few years. If you haven’t done it, it can actually be a problem for career development.”
Of course, India can, and does, get under your skin. Often these overachievers are appalled by stifling bureaucracy, stonewalling politicians, slow traffic, and outdated ideas – the detritus from the past. But they are prepared for the worst. “I didn’t face many disappointments,” says IIT Kanpur graduate Ranjan Bose, Agarwal’s former partner in Design Expo. “I had a realistic picture in mind. I was prepared for the worst... let’s just say my expectations were low. If you are well organised, you won’t face too many problems, except perhaps when dealing with the government.”
As things improve in India the trend is clear: in the minds of India’s graduates, the West is no longer best.
--
Rakesh Krishnan is a features writer with Fairfax New Zealand. He has previously worked with Businessworld, India Today and Hindustan Times, and was news editor with the Financial Express.
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