|
India - News
Editorial
Opinion
Overview
Infrastructure
Demographics
Entertainment
Site
Map
Search site
Subscribe
Karmayogi
|
|
20 April 2008 - News Updates
Brain gain for India - Observer
How India 'colonized' Britain - TIME
The baton passes to Asia - New York Times
Advice from Bill Gates - Miami Herald
'Brain
gain' for India as elite return
20
April 2008, The Observer (UK), By Amelia Gentleman
Ashutosh Gupta's home in Richmond Park has all the lifestyle comforts that
many educated Indians of his generation left India to attain - lush and
peaceful gardens, a gym, a pool and, most important, unwavering electricity
and water supplies. This luxury block in the ultra-modern Delhi suburb of
Gurgaon (about 4,000 miles from Richmond, London) houses several hundred
Indian families who have recently returned from living in the West, part of
a 'reverse brain drain' migration which is gathering speed.
Indian politicians are
beginning to highlight, approvingly, the emerging phenomenon of 'brain
gain', as large numbers of Indian-born executives decide that job
opportunities and living conditions are as good, if not better, in India and
make their way home.
Gupta, 38, moved to
this gated enclave after 15 years spent studying and later working as a
Goldman Sachs banker in New York and London. 'Ten years ago, if I had
considered moving back, people would have questioned my sanity, and assumed
I couldn't hack it in the US,' he said. 'Now everyone recognises that India
is a very exciting place. There are tens of thousands of people like me
making the decision to return.'
A survey published
last week showed that graduates from India's most prestigious universities,
the Indian Institutes of Technology (known as IITs), increasingly see India
as the best place in the world to base themselves. Until about five years
ago large numbers of these elite graduates would abandon home at the first
opportunity to take up well-paid jobs or to continue their education in the
US and Europe.
Between 1964 and 2001
(when the economy was sluggish), 35 per cent of the nation's most promising
graduates moved abroad, according to research conducted by the Delhi-based
organisation, Evalueserve, but from 2002 onwards (the period when India's
GDP began to soar) only 16 per cent chose to leave. Now, the research
suggests, the West no longer seems synonymous with wealth and opportunity.
Asked to predict which country would 'hold the most promise for success' in
10 years' time, 72 per cent of the 677 IIT graduates surveyed named India,
with only 17 per cent citing the US, 5 per cent Europe, and just 2 per cent
China. The number who feel the US offers a better standard of living than
India has fallen since 2001 from 13 per cent to almost zero. The study is a
clear sign that the lamented flight of India's best students, which has
troubled the government for decades, may be reversing, in tandem with the
turnaround in economic prospects.
The Indian government
does not compile figures of the numbers of people emigrating or returning,
but Alok Aggarwal, chairman of Evalueserve, who wrote the report, said the
trend of returning Indians 'seemed to be very strong'. The pull of the West
remained powerful for many Indians, he said, 'but at the very top level of
graduates, the smart choice now is to stay'. The flow of reverse migration
has been particularly striking in the southern Indian IT city of Bangalore,
where research published last year estimated that more than 40,000 Indian
technology professionals had arrived back from the US and the UK to take up
work.
Aggarwal, now 48, left
India after graduating from an IIT in the 1980s and moved to the US. 'There
was a lot of guilt associated with the decision to leave. We felt like rats
leaving a sinking ship. But at the time there were few employment
opportunities here,' he said. In the late 1980s Delhi did not seem a very
alluring place to return to; even getting a phone line installed involved a
wait of about two and a half years.
Now the decision to
choose India is much easier. Jobs are plentiful and, armed with good
salaries, the newly returned can cocoon themselves in gated Western-style
ghettoes, which shut out any trace of the ever-present slums, squalor and
poverty. The golf clubs of Delhi and neighbouring Gurgaon are full of
recently returned Indians.
Gupta said his switch
to a private equity job in Delhi was partly motivated by a desire to spend
more time with his parents, and partly down to his sense that he could do
much more with his talents in India, than he could in London. 'I would sit
at my desk on Fleet Street, read about what was happening in India and I'd
ask myself: What am I doing here? It was an obvious choice to return.' But
the transition was painful. 'After so many years away, it was a shock to be
back. The traffic, the chaos, it all takes a bit of adjustment.' But living
alongside hundreds of other 'like-minded returnees' had helped to dull the
culture shock.
Yusuf Hatia, India
vice-president of the public relations firm Fleishman-Hillard, was conscious
that his decision to return to live in Mumbai a year ago, with his wife and
young son, was a peculiar mirror of his parents' choice to emigrate to the
UK, when he was aged three, in 1975. 'My parents left India for the UK for
economic reasons, and because they believed that they could give me a better
education there,' he said, adding that the same reasons - the appeal of good
schools, better lifestyle, and well-paid and interesting work - had
persuaded him to move back. His shift from Hackney to India's business
capital has afforded him a full-time nanny, a driver and private education
for his son 'without any of it seeming a ridiculous luxury'. The cost of
renting an apartment (about £5,000 a month, and rising) was an unexpected
shock.
'A lot of my family
who are of Indian origin, living in Britain, thought I was pretty crazy.
They still see India as a place to escape from, a place of poverty, not
somewhere to come and do business,' he said. 'Of course, India is still a
place of poverty, but in the business world there is an extraordinary sense
of optimism. The long term prospects for working here are better.'
How India 'Colonized'
Britain
11 April 2008,
TIME magazine, By Simon Robinson
In the six decades
since Britain ended its rule in India, the two countries have had their
share of spats. Indian resentment over past wrongs pushed the
sub-continental giant to distance itself from its colonial master and forge
a role as a "non-aligned" leader during the Cold War. For years,
England-India cricket matches were charged with an extra element of rivalry
as the Indian team tried to outdo their erstwhile colonial masters. A little
over a decade ago an Indian Prime Minister called the U.K. a "third-rate"
country after a perceived slight on an anniversary, and Prince Philip caused
a furor during a Royal visit to the site of the massacre at Amritsar when he
suggested that a memorial plaque "exaggerated" the number of people killed
there by British troops. Still, while such contretemps may make headlines,
they also distract from the love affair between Britain and India that
endures to this day.
It's an affair born of
shared history: Tea, for example, that most English of drinks, was first
cultivated in India by British growers, who quickly undercut their Chinese
competitors on price. Like cricket (which the English introduced to India)
and polo (though its origins are Persian, the modern game began in northeast
India and was later encoded and spread by the British), drinking tea is a
joyous ritual that binds Delhi and Doncaster. (Polo is a rich man's sport,
of course, but class and caste have long mattered in both countries.)
Then there is
language. English may be Britain's greatest gift to India (which, today, is
home to the world's largest English-speaking population), but Hindi has
spiced the language with a masala of words long-since codified in its
dictionaries: chit, guru, jungle, pajamas, pundit, sentry, shampoo, and
thug, to name just a few. Indian cuisine long ago surpassed fish-and-chips
as Britain's most popular restaurant food. Or, at least, "Anglo-Indian" —
England's most popular "Indian" dish, chicken tikka masala, is actually a
British invention, since exported to the land that inspired it. Indian
property and hotel developers borrow the lexicon of their English
counterparts, using terms such as park, mews or estate in the names of new
upscale complexes. A hint of Britain sells, it seems.
Little wonder then,
that when Tata Motors, one of India's biggest car companies, agreed to buy
prestige British brands Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford three weeks ago,
there were cheers in both India and Britain. Indian newspapers reveled in
the fact that a company from the former empire had brought two icons of the
British automotive industry, while Jaguar execs privately told at least one
industry insider that they preferred Tata over rival bids from private
equity firms because Tata understands the heritage of Jag and the motoring
culture that produced it. "Buying this kind of thing builds a kind of
permanent bridge between us," says Lt. Gen. M.R. Kochhar, president of the
Delhi Gymkhana Club, a repository of colonial-era rules and British
class-system etiquette in the heart of the Indian capital. "Both of us love
the products, or at least the history of the products."
But these are business
decisions rather than gestures of colonial nostalgia. Tata bought Jaguar not
because it is British, but because it thinks it can make the company work
where Ford failed. Indeed, Tata might turn out to be more hard-nosed (and
lucky) than Ford. For too long, Jag's American owners relied on the
company's heritage to sell more cars, releasing model after model largely
based on the classic Jaguar look that dates back to 1968. Though Ford never
broke out separate results for Jaguar and Land Rover, analysts believe the
former lost at least $10 billion over the past decade or so (Land Rover has
been in good health the past few years and made an estimated $1 billion in
2007). Tata is buying Jaguar just as the company has finally broken its
repetitive mold and released a car that is truly new and modern looking.
Some analysts say Tata's timing is perfect, and that if it manages the
British manufacturer well, it could prove to be very profitable.
That doesn't mean,
however, that the shared passions and pastimes, drinks and diversions of
Britain and India are irrelevant. Far from it. Indian companies have been on
a buying spree over the past few years, snapping up companies across the
globe. Some of the biggest and most high-profile have involved British firms
(Tata Motors' parent company, alone, has bought tea makers Tetley and steel
giant Corus) and that's likely to continue, not only because Britain is a
vibrant, open economy but because the shared history does count for
something. "More than 200 years we were together," says Kochhar. "And any
people who speak the same language have an understanding. Irrespective of
the kind of things that happened in our past we owe a lot to Britain. And
now that it's our turn in the sun of course we look at British things in a
desirable way." It's not that being British or Indian will guarantee close
relations, good ties. But it helps when you begin to talk if you both know
what's pukka.
Top of the page
The
baton passes to Asia
31 March 2008, New York Times, By Roger Cohen
It’s the end of the
era of the white man. I know your head is spinning. The world can feel like
one of those split-screen TVs with images of a suicide bombing in Baghdad
flashing, and the latest awful market news coursing along the bottom, and an
ad for some stool-loosening wonder drug squeezed into a corner. The jumble
makes no sense. It just goes on, like the mindless clacking of an
ice-dispenser.
On the globalized
treadmill, you drop your eyes again from the screen (now showing ads for
gourmet canine cuisine) to the New Yorker or Asahi Shimbun. And another bomb
goes off.
There’s a lot of noise
and not much signal. Everywhere there is flux and the reaction to it: the
quest, sometimes violent, for national or religious identity. These
alternate faces of globalization — fluidity and tribalism — define our
frontier-dissolving world.
The breaking sound
right now is that of the end of the era of the white man. I’d been thinking
about this at Dubai airport in the middle of the night, as the latest news
came in from the United States of the bloody end to the mother of all
spending binges. I was watching the newly affluent from other parts of the
world — Asians and Arabs principally — spend their way through the
early-morning hours.
The West’s moment, I
thought, is passing. Money and might are increasingly elsewhere. America’s
little dose of socialism from Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson might stave off
the worst but cannot halt the trend.
Then I arrived in Hong
Kong. The talk was all about how U.S. economic woes could impact Chinese
growth. Might it tumble to 8 from over 11 percent? And what of India,
powering along with growth of a mere 8 percent or so?
The West should have
such troubles! Even revised downward, these growth rates are at levels
Europe and the United States can only dream of. Decoupling is not possible
in an interlinked world: export-led Asian economies are vulnerable in some
measure to U.S. troubles. But that measure dwindles as the Chinese, Indian
and Vietnamese domestic markets explode.
Asian statistics can
be numbing. With one third of humanity, the numbers get big. The likelihood
that some 300 million people will move from rural to urban India in the next
20 years — and you get a sense of the shifts underway. By 2030, India will
probably overtake Japan as the world’s third-largest economy behind the
United States and China.
But in the end,
transformation is not about numbers. It’s about the mind. Come to Asia and
fear drains away. It’s replaced by confidence and a burning desire to
succeed. Asian business leaders are rock stars. The culture of education and
achievement is fierce. What you feel in Asia, said Claude Smadja, a
prominent global strategist, is “a burst of energy, of new dreams, and the
end of the era of Western domination and the white man.”
Everything passes. In
the 17th century, China and India accounted for more than half the world’s
economic output. After a modest interlude, the pendulum is swinging back to
them at a speed the West has not grasped. It’s the end of the era of the
white man; and, before it even began in earnest, of the white woman, too.
Advice from Bill
Gates: Focus on education
6 April 2008, Miami Herald, By ANDRES OPPENHEIMER
One
of the things that surprised me the most during a rare interview with
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates on Latin American affairs was his response
to my question on what the region should do to become a world-class
technological innovation center, and play in the big leagues of the global
economy. ''The United States has the best universities,'' he said. He added
that this is partly because of Americans' willingness to invest in new
ventures and an efficient patent and legal system, but mainly thanks to the
top universities.
Still, this may change
in the future, he said. China and India are producing many more computer
engineers than the United States, where the fastest-growing graduate major
is physical education, he noted.
Asked what Latin
American countries should do to compete with China and India, and stimulate
technological research and development that would allow them to produce
higher-value added exports, Gates said that the first thing would be
improving the region's high-school system, and the second thing would be
improving universities.
At the university
level, Gates said, China and India are successfully trying to copy some of
the best practices of the U.S. university system, such as a culture of
government funding of research projects, a tradition of philanthropy where
alumnae give back to their universities, close relationships between
universities and start-up companies, and intellectual property incentives
for professors who come up with inventions. ''China and India are going to
close a lot of that gap [with the United States] over the course of 20 or 30
years, and Latin America should be in that game,'' Gates said. “It should be
in many respects the leader in many things that go on.''
My conclusion: The
very fact that he said that Latin America should strive to be in the same
league as China and India in two or three decades suggests that he's not
ruling it out, which should give the region some solace, and prod it to
catch up with the world's emerging technology powers.
Top of the page |
|
30 Apr '08
23 Apr '08
20 Apr '08
19 Apr '08
News Updates
31 Aug '07
15 Aug '07
30 Jun '07
15 Jun '07
31 May '07
15 May '07
10 May '07
30 Apr '07
29 Apr '07
27 Apr '07
31 Mar '07
15 Mar '07
28 Feb '07
20 Feb '07
15 Feb '07
|
