05.18.06

Brain Drain

Posted in Education at 8:39 am by The Editor

Is it brain drain when the best in this country leave for a foreign country?
Or is it ‘that’ when they either stay back or go abroad and do not utilize their intellectual resources?

Let’s debate.

Every time I hear ‘brain drain’, there is a mention of an IIT and an IIM in this context.
Everyone else going abroad(from lesser institutes) is perfectly fine, since the rest of us are idiots anyways : ). I never quite got that.

Let’s start with the BrainDrain thing.
Is a person perceived as having intellectual capital, leaving the country a loss for India?

I’m not sure it is.
Let’s take Sabeer Bhatia for example. He pretty much commercialized email and made it available to the masses. Prior to Hotmail, only the Dept of Defense-US and later corporates were using email as a mode of communication. He sold Hotmail to Microsoft for roughly $400 million.

Could he have spawned something like Hotmail in India?
No way.
Reasons: One, Venture Capitalists were not really prevalent in India at that time. So there’s no way he could have got funded.
Two, with our near zero IT infrastructure, extremely low computer penetration (in the mid 90’s), had he even started with it, it would never have caught up and would have died a quick death.

Did India lose from this?

No. Worse we benefitted (surprise).
US companies recognized the technical skills of a person of Indian origin.
Most Indians in Silicon Valley were respected for their tech skills and this pretty much meant more jobs for Indians, more forex repatriations.
Sabeer Bhatia too came back to India and started other ventures using local human capital.

The world and India benefited from this invention of mail being available free of cost to end users.
So pretty much a person had the ability and used it for personal gain, gain for the community, country and world at large.

So what would Sabeer have done had he been in India?
Started his own PCO with STD/ISD and juice bar? I think so too.

Is there something conceptually called BrainDrain?
Let’s assume a person of Indian origin developed a cure for AIDS in Stanford. This discovery would pretty much help AIDS patients worldwide. If I were that person I would want my discovery to benefit every person in the planet suffering from that disease and not just people in my country. Similarly if I wrote a book or made a movie, sang a song.

A skilled person is a global resource since his skills have far reaching benefits for society. He should be given a platform that allows him to propagate his skills to the largest audience available. If not, it’s a waste to the whole community. Technology propagates, so does science. Inventions/Creations from Bell Labs, Kodak, Sony, Philips, BMW are all being utilized globally.
So ‘it’s’ never wasted.

People only talk of Brain Drain when someone leaves country.

What when someone leaves village? Is that acceptable?
Let’s say I was born in Pimpalgaon and then moved to Baramati and then Bombay … no one would call this brain drain. So if you move from village to city or even from city to state… you are fine. No one points fingers at you.

Just as some people are comfortable leaving village or city or state … others are able to extend that to country and maybe planet. The world is my playing field. And I compete globally. This is what we should be thinking as Indians. Unfortunately we don’t and this even extends to the world of business and commerce. We have giants like the Tata’s, Bajaj’s, Mahindra’s and all these folks have production facilities only in India(or minimally abroad). They export globally but produce only in India. They could have been global players since they could easily extend their model to Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, any country in Africa, Eastern Europe. But they never did (they’re doing so now.) But look at foreign companies, they pretty much are fighting each other to be in India, China and any country that will help them ship out a globally competitive-quality product.

The West has always looked at foreign shores and tried to learn from what we have to offer, be it religion or mathematics, science or medicine. We’re happy when people come from abroad to discover our country and it’s strengths. Other countries too have skills that we could learn from and use. We should be open to a communication where the flow is two way.

(Also why do we care only about IIM’s and IIT grads going abroad?
For two reasons: One, we perceive them to be the best.
Two, because the government hugely subsidizes their fees.

I’m sure they are the best. But why should I spend my tax payer money paying for their fees? These institutes should charge students market rate and not be subsidized and controlled by the government. If market rate per year for an IIT’ian is say 3 lacs p.a, then he should be paying this or should have access to loans that help him pay this amount. All banks will lend since these people definitely get the best jobs and will pay back. Similarly for IIM’s. An MBA course in Stanford would be say betwture .. so repayment should be simple.

I want my tax payer money to benefit the poorest(read me : ) ) or pay for better infrastructure. Not subsidize some future NRI or LRP (local rich person).

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