India and the Indians in NZ

I will begin by mentioning what I consider to be a unique development in the field of tertiary education and higher academic research in New Zealand, so far as India is concerned.
On 19 October 2012 at a joint meeting of the India New Zealand Education Council at Vigyan Bhavan in New Delhi, Hon. Steven Joyce, our Tertiary Education Minister, announced the establishment of the New Zealand India Research Institute. It was planned as a consortium of seven New Zealand universities to focus on the study of India and India-New Zealand relations.

No such government funded research institute exclusively focusing on India ever existed in this country. And to my knowledge, the only other country, which has attracted a similar exclusive attention and generous research funding, is China. On 29 August 2013 the Institute was formally inaugurated, with Dr Kaushik Basu, the Senior Vice President and Chief Economist at the World Bank, attending as the guest of honour. 

So the question is, what does this new initiative imply in terms of our government’s attitude towards India and the people of Indian origin living in this country.

 In my view this new initiative signifies the fruition of a policy shift that has been occurring at least since the late 1990s. It was finally formalised through the release in 2011 of a policy document called ‘ Opening Doors to India: New Zealand’s 2015 Vision’.

The vision that it presented was: “India will become a core trade, economic and political partner for New Zealand” by 2015, and to achieve that the NZ Inc India Strategy was also charted. The India Institute is a part of that strategy to support long-term trade and economic links with India.The document also openly acknowledges - to my knowledge for the first time in any official
policy document – that “skilled migrants from India” add economic value to New Zealand society. Therefore, it sets out one of its six goals as: “Attract and retain skilled migrants from India who are able to make an effective contribution to New Zealand’s economic base.”

This is a formal official acknowledgement of the importance of India and Indians for New Zealand. This decisive policy shift needs to be read in the context of what the census of 2013 has just revealed: the number of Indians has grown to 155,178, constituting about 3.9% of the national population, registering an increase of 48.4% over the 2006 census figures. More about that later.

Professor Sekhar Bandyopadhyay is the Director of New Zealand India Research Institute. He is a historian and an award-winning author. He was also a speaker at Auckland Diwali’s Speakers series.