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15 February 2007 -
News Updates Indian immigrants enticed to go home
Lured by the booming Indian economy and fed up with living as outsiders in a foreign society, many Indian and other South Asian immigrants in the United States are returning to their homeland -- and bringing with them cutting-edge American skills.
"This is a happening place," said Ader Gandi, 49, a Pakistani-American mortgage broker from San Francisco who decided to become an art photography dealer in Mumbai, India's chaotic commercial capital, after arriving as a tourist two years ago. "Everywhere you look there are things coming up and happening that just weren't there two years ago -- there's just so much growth." Spurred by market reforms and a dynamic entrepreneurial class, India's once-sluggish economy has been growing by about 7 percent a year for the last decade, faster than every country in the world except China. Many salaries have almost doubled since 2005, as has the country's stock market index.
This has opened vast new opportunities in multiple fields and infused much of urban India with a tremendous sense of possibility and optimism. Coupled with India's traditionally rich social life that's been made all the more rambunctious by prosperity, this offers returnees an intoxicating mix of professional and personal satisfaction. "Let me put it this way -- after living 20 years in the Bay Area I had 80 telephone numbers in my cellphone and after living here two years I have 200," said Gandi. "Life in the US can get a bit lonely, but here there is something happening all the time. People don't wait until the weekend to party."
New Delhi is acutely conscious of the money and expertise that returning Indians bring to local businesses, nonprofit organizations, and universities, and has been welcoming its dispersed children back home with open arms. A Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs has been created and a number of incentives for returnees have recently been announced, including permitting them to hold dual citizenship for the first time. Various programs to attract Indian-origin intellectuals and professors to Indian universities have also been launched. While the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs says about 50,000 overseas Indians have applied for the new "overseas citizen of India" status, there are no reliable figures for the exact number of Indians resettling permanently in India.
Many returnees, especially those with children, say cheap labor is one of the most attractive personal reasons for reverse-migrating from the United States where the costs and demands of child care, education, and managing after-school activities are spiraling. Family ties are another driver. Anant Patel, 38, an engineer who lived for 12 years in the Chicago area and returned to India in 2003 to start a trading company, said he had grown tired of sustaining bonds with loved ones in India through expensive and brief two-week vacations every year. "Now everything is available in India," Patel said. "The logic of staying abroad wasn't there anymore."
Most of the 1.2 million Indian immigrants who began streaming into the United States in the 1970s and '80s were basically economic refugees, so they face fewer barriers to return home than emigrants from countries rife with political repression. But even second-generation Indian-Americans are giving up the only life they have known in the United States to set up home in their ancestral homeland. Prakash Shukla, whose parents immigrated to New York in the late 1960s, said he had a lucrative job with IBM when he decided to move to Mumbai and work with the Tata Group, India's largest conglomerate. "My parents were surprised," said Shukla, who is now the chief information officer of Indian Hotels Ltd., the Tata group company that recently bought Boston's historic Ritz-Carlton hotel. Shukla said his first few years were dogged with frustration at India's legendary bureaucracy and collapsed civic amenities. "My dad had gone to the US to study and stayed on because at that time getting a job in India was a huge problem. I love America and have close childhood buddies there. But I know India from so many visits and always wanted to be here." From camel caravans to a fortress city
The 850-year-old fortress in Jaisalmer, sits like a honey-colored sandcastle 250 feet above the town in the Thar desert, a reminder of a time when the town was an important trading outpost for wealthy merchants catering to the camel caravans traveling between India and Central Asia. About 5,000 people still live within its walls, running shops, hotels and cafes in ancient stone merchants' mansions called havelis. The buildings are decorated with filigree details so intricate they look as if they were carved from wood.
Jaisalmer floundered at the end of the 19th century when traders abandoned the desert for sea routes, but the fort, one of few that's still inhabited, attracted tourists drawn by the sight of its 30-foot-high walls and 99 turrets. While business has been good for everyone from camel drivers to cafe owners, increased water consumption has put stress on the ancient drainage system and is endangering the old buildings built on foundations of clay, rock and sand. There's a complex of ancient Jain temples inside the walls and the royal palace, now a museum but, like many medieval towns in Europe, much of the rest of the old town resembles a souvenir shop with every stall selling the same silk scarves and books made of camel leather.
A more authentic 21st-century Jaisalmer exists outside the fort in the noisy market streets near several 18th- and 19th-century havelis that have been restored and preserved as museums. Wandering those back alleys, I walked past shops selling colorful Indian sweets and stalls filled with temple offerings.
Every hotel in Jaisalmer sets up camel safaris for its guests. The camels are owned by villagers, and the best outfitters arrange for you to be taken by Jeep to start your ride in remote areas where there are few other tourists. The riding time is usually short — a few hours in the late afternoon before the sun sets and a couple more early the next morning. Two hours on a camel is enough for most first-timers, but for those who can take the sun and heat, two- or three-day treks offer the chance to travel deeper into the desert.
I'd heard stories about riding camels — that the bobbing up and down would make me queasy and that my thighs would ache. None of this turned out to be true. More gentle than a horse, 3-year-old Camu ambled with a rhythmic gait. When he slowed down to snack on desert grass, my guide Ummed nudged him along, steering him away from crevices and cactus needles. Their ancestors used camels to carry silk and spices as they traveled in caravans on the trade route that linked India to Central Asia. Today, the villagers make their living guiding tourists who pay $30 or $40 for the chance to spend the night sleeping on the sand dunes under the stars. Our camels carried piles of wool blankets that became our beds for the night. Strapped to their backs were a few pots and plastic sacks of vegetables for a dinner cooked over a campfire. The sand was our table, bed and latrine. Our two German traveling companions ran up and down the dunes in their bare feet, calling out when they spotted shooting stars. The wind kept us awake much of the night, and when we crawled out of the tent at sunrise, we saw that the gusts had reshaped the dunes into fresh mounds. Even for someone like me who'd sooner eat grass than camp in the sand, it had been a magical night. Lifting the veil on a new world power (Book review)4 February 2007, Guardian (UK)/ New York Times, By Ben Macintyre/ Kelly McEversIt's been said that we citizens of the world know more about each other than ever before -- that in a few short decades, globalization and its millions of miles of fiber-optic cable have allowed us unprecedented access to the most remote parts of the world. Countries as vast and complex as India are reduced, by us, to a handful of stock images: saffron-tinted ashrams, teeming call centers, nuclear stare-downs, Bollywood. Edward Luce's rich but compact book, "In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India," thankfully seeks to add some more frames to that picture. For roughly 400 years, educated young Englishmen have been traveling to India, staying there for a brief period and then opining expansively on the problems, contrasts and beauties of the country. Its a sign, perhaps, that the complex relationship between Britain and India has finally reached some sort of equilibrium. Meandering across this vast country, Luce meets crooks, heroes, software billionaires and rural saints. Varied and paradoxical, India resists generalizations, and Luce knows it. Balance is all; indeed, balance out of bedlam may be the key to India’s success. For every example of systemic graft, cruelty and want, there is another of imagination, candor and can-do, like the extraordinary effectiveness with which the state of Tamil Nadu tackled the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami.
The book opens with a familiar character. A Westerner -- in this case, a Frenchman named André -- is so taken with Indian philosophy that he has relocated to a small town in Southern India dedicated to Sri Aurobindo, one of India's most celebrated spiritual leaders. The community's inhabitants believe that India possesses a "moral and spiritual force" strong enough to help the world transcend materialism. André tells the author, "India is the key to the survival of the human race."
India often is compared to China, as the world's next great economic power. Luce offers apt differences: India's population remains stubbornly rural; China's is increasingly urban. India's economy is driven by the service sector; China's by manufacturing. India's literacy rate is 65 percent; China's is nearly 90 percent. Luce also contends that India holds some advantages to China. One is the country's long-standing commitment to higher education. India graduates 1 million engineers each year, compared with fewer than 100,000 in both the United States and Europe. What's more, unlike their counterparts in China, India's graduates speak English. This means India will continue to lead the high-end, skilled-worker manufacturing sector, Luce says.
India also is seen as a foil to China's political and military rise. Luce, a former Clinton administration speechwriter, says that's why the U.S. government has endorsed India's nuclear program, despite American officials' reluctance to say so publicly. "Because of its sheer size and the nature of its political system [the world's largest democracy], India is seen as the only country that could counterbalance China's rise as a global power," which American is watching with "growing anxiety."
In contrast to China, India has given greater weight to stability than efficiency, an investment that could pay huge dividends in the long run. China has built its infrastructure at a breathless pace, but India has painfully forged an independent judiciary, a free press and a vibrant pluralist society, institutional advantages that may mean “the Indian tortoise will eventually overtake the Chinese hare.” Most, I suspect, will relish the whole-souled enthusiasm for the place and its possibilities, an optimism that Indian democracy will always overcome. A new deity is rising in India, with the “visible cult of wealth” in which “brands are the new religion.” But the French hippie who tells Luce this new religion will be absorbed and adapted in India like all the others is probably right. India has a special gift for keeping its gods in balance, in spite of modernity. Let them eat feedback TIME magazine, By Simon Robinson
India, the tourist guides tell you, is a land of extremes. And nowhere more so than when it comes to customer service. In my first three months here, I have experienced long flight delays with no announcements, waiters who evaded eye contact for 15 minutes or more, and repairmen who failed to turn up at my house for appointments but then arrived unannounced a few days later. At the same time the best airlines in India will send me a text message if my flight is delayed, my kids' doctor rings a couple of days after a visit to see how his patient is doing, and the staff in a couple of hotels have been so skilful and gracious that I was barely aware of all they were doing to make my day more pleasant. Order a pizza? You'll get a call back later to see how it was. Good experience or bad, though, they never fail to ask me to rate their performance.
Customer satisfaction forms, suggestion boxes and service surveys are more ubiquitous in India than anywhere else I've been. In hotels, at restaurants, on flights, Indian companies seem obsessed with tracking what you think of them and how they might improve. Don't get me wrong, I love filling in those little circles (Excellent, Good, Average, Poor) and am even what you might call a service obsessive: On occasion I'll go so far as to add in my own categories if I think the grades offered are too limiting — what else can you do if the service was better than "average" but not quite "good." But India's love affair with customer feedback may be too much even for me.
Curious about the reason for this obsession with feedback, I rang a couple of experts. Murali Swamy, the Bangalore-based head of research and consulting at research firm Gallup India reckons it has to do with the fact that free enterprise is relatively new in India, and that only in the past decade or so have firms been forced to begin thinking about their customer. In the old days, companies "used to have people queued up outside their offices to whom they would dole out their products depending on favoritism and availability. Now it's a market of supply and there's a lot more competition, so businesses have to be much more customer-focused."
Sridevi Rao, an associate vice president at the research firm IMRB International in Mumbai, agrees. As new retail, telecom, credit card and airline businesses slug it out in the booming Indian market, she says, "players in these sectors are still in the process of standardizing service delivery while at the same time having to put up with strong competition from multiple service providers. In such a scenario it is inevitable that feedback is crucial to benchmark and improve service standards." Interestingly, Swamy also believes India's role as the world's back office over the past few years has hammered home the idea that the world's best companies are customer focused. Employees at firms processing customer feedback forms from Europe or taking calls for companies based in the U.S., for instance, take the concept that customer is king with them when they start their own businesses. Which got me to thinking: what about a customer feedback form in which ordinary Indians could rate their government on a series of questions? After all, the government is the provider of such crucial services as education and health. Imagine a form asking whether Indians were happy that dengue fever killed only dozens of people in Delhi last year rather than hundreds? Whether the regular power outages in their neighborhood were Fair, Annoying or Criminal? Or whether the health facilities in their local hospital were Good, Poor or Life Endangering? Then it occurred to me that the government already gets pretty good feedback every few years. It's called an election. |
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