Why India’s Brightest & Best Flee Abroad

Following the recent appointment of India-born and schooled Satya Nadella and Rajeev Suri as chief executives of Microsoft Inc and Nokia, this question has aroused great public interest and debate in academia. Neeta Lal reports

WHY DO GRADUATES OF India’s beleaguered institutions of higher education (35,000 colleges, 700 universities), which can’t make the authoritative QS or Times Higher Education annual rankings of the global Top 200 universities, nonetheless succeed spectacularly abroad, often rising to apex-level positions in globally top-ranked professionally-managed companies?

This question has aroused great public interest and considerable debate in Indian academia following the recent appointment of India-born and schooled Satya Nadella and Rajeev Suri — both engineering graduates of the modestly-ranked Manipal (Karnataka)-based Manipal Institute of Technology — as chief executive officers at Microsoft Inc, the world’s premier IT software development behemoth (annual revenue: $77.85 billion or Rs.484,149 crore), and the Finnish telecommunications conglomerate Nokia (annual revenue: Euro 12.7 billion or Rs.101,679 crore).

Nadella and Suri are the latest additions to a long list of India-born and educated professionals heading offshore multinational corporations. Others include: Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo Inc; Anshu Jain, co-CEO of Deutsche Bank; Ajay Banga, CEO of MasterCard Inc; Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe Systems; Nikesh Arora, chief business officer at Google Inc; Ajit Jain, president, Berkshire Hathaway Inc, and Padmasree Warrior, chief technology and strategy officer, Cisco Systems Inc.

Public confusion about this paradox is compounded by media and even academia euphoria about the success of Indian professionals in highly competitive workplaces in the US, Europe and the UK, among other countries. The uncomfortable question of why Nadella and Suri among a host of other technology and business professionals routinely flee abroad to enable and enrich foreign organisations and economies is glossed over.

In a special feature (August 2011), the globe-girdling Time magazine described business management professionals as India’s “leading export” to western economies. It quotes a study conducted by Egon Zehnder of S&P (Standard & Poor) 500 companies, which found more Indian CEOs in US companies than of any other nationality except American. “Indians lead seven companies; Canadians four. Among C-suite executives in the 2009 Fortune 500 were two mainland Chinese, two North American Chinese and 13 Indians, according to a study by two professors of the Wharton and China Europe International Business School,” wrote Carla Power in the special issue of arguably the world’s most widely read English language weekly.

However euphoria induced by the extraordinary achievements of Indian professionals in foreign countries is not universal. There are some political pundits and monitors of the Indian economy who are inclined to derive logical conclusions from this strange phenomenon. Rajiv Desai, a well-known Delhi-based columnist and president of Comma Communications, questions the “misleading triumphalism” which trumpeted the Nadella and Suri ascensions in India.

“It is vital not to be misled by triumphal media which adulates the success of Nadella, Indra Nooyi and others as feathers in the nation’s cap. True, these are men and women shaped by India’s higher education system. But they went away, knowing well that opportunities for intellectual growth and pursuit of knowledge lay outside the country. India’s higher education system does produce world-class scientists, engineers, managers and doctors but the economy lacks the sophistication to absorb them. Consequently, these heavily-subsidised technical and professional academic institutions produce skilled manpower for more evolved global corporations,” wrote Desai in an essay for EducationWorld (March).

Although Desai is inclined to give India’s higher education system a good, if not clean chit, the plain and widely acknowledged reality is that even the highest-ranked Indian universities are at best good teaching shops for undergrad students. They offer indifferent postgrad and particularly, poor quality research programmes and facilities. Hence ambitious graduates tend to sign up for postgraduate education in foreign — particularly American — universities with well-structured and industry-linked postgrad and research programmes, even if it means incurring large debt. Subsequently, given the red carpet the merit-driven US industry rolls out for them, few return. 

The trickle of India’s brightest and best to foreign shores began in the 1960s, accelerated in the 1970s during the height of the licence-permit-quota raj era when the Indian economy was stuck in the Hindu rate of growth (3.5 percent per annum), and turned into a flood in the 90s and new millennium with the dawn of the global IT (information technology) boom epicentred in the US. Therefore failed economic policies, particularly neta-babu socialism which was the dominant ideology of post-independence India for over 40 years until the economic liberalisation and deregulation initiative of 1991, are as much to blame for driving the brightest and best graduates of Indian varsities to the West.

"Over the past four    decades, India has lost many of its most talented scientists, doctors and engineers educated at great public expense in highly-subsidised institutions, to the West. A combination of factors — lack of a progressive and advanced higher education system and dearth of employment opportunities in industry — forced our best students and professionals to flee abroad to improve their academic and career prospects,” confirms Dr. Vasantha R. Patri, the Delhi-based chairperson of the Indian Institute of Counseling and a former lecturer at New Delhi’s premier Lady Shri Ram College and former lecturer of psychology at Temple and Rutgers (USA) universities.

The magnitude of India’s brain drain prompted by the neglect of education and inorganic socio-economic development policies, is indicated by a research paper, Indian Human Resources Mobility: Brain Drain vs. Brain Gain published by the federal ministry of labour and social affairs, Berlin in 2012. According to the authors, with an estimated diaspora of 11.4 million India is second only to Mexico (11.9 million) as a source of emigrants, and exports the largest number of qualified medical practitioners and nurses to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member countries, especially the UK, USA, Australia and Canada. In the UK, 25,336 India-qualified doctors are currently employed in the country’s hospitals.

Indeed ill-considered and wrongful over-subsidisation of higher education (at the cost of more important early childhood and primary education) has cost the country dear. For instance, an estimated 53 percent of graduates of the top-ranked Central government-funded state-of-the-art All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi, which levies an annual tuition fee of Rs.850 (cf. actual expenditure of Rs.17.5 lakh per student), leave to study abroad and never return. This unchecked brain drain is ubiquitous with graduates from private medical colleges in which state governments subsidise the tuition fee of ‘merit students’ also contributing to the exodus. According to the Medical Council of India, during the past three years over 3,000 MBBS graduates urgently needed in India, left for foreign shores, and are unlikely to return. 

“Competition for admission into postgraduate medical programmes particularly in super-specialty disciplines is intense with demand far exceeding supply. Moreover, in sharp contrast to the situation in Western countries, there are very few openings for postgraduates as most hospitals lack the infrastructure and facilities required for researching and practicing super specialty subjects. But things are slowly changing in India with the construction of healthcare infrastructure and encouragement of super specialty clinics/hospitals. Hopefully this will encourage our medical graduates to remain in the country and serve the public,” says Dr. Vijaya Badhwar, professor of gynaecology at D.Y. Patil Medical College, Nerul, Navi Mumbai.

If to the annual exodus of qualified medical practitioners, one were to add the number of engineers and in particular computer science graduates fleeing India annually, the cost to the economy is $2 billion (Rs.12,000 crore) per year, according to UNDP estimates. “A number of reasons are behind the continuous brain drain of engineers. In the 1970s and 80s, the shortage of higher education options in engineering disciplines particularly information technology, and a stagnant economy where jobs were impossible to get and dependent on network and connections, forced many of our brightest and best to emigrate in search of better study and career opportunities. After liberalisation and the IT boom, although emigration has reduced because well-paid jobs have become available in India, socio-economic factors such as pervasive corruption, and poor public facilities in our cities and towns, and inadequate postgrad and research facilities fuel the brain drain. Though during the past decade, some NRIs have returned to India and promoted IT companies, the exodus out of India is several multiples higher and unlikely to abate,” says Prof. Jawahar Doreswamy, pro vice chancellor of PES University, Bangalore, which offers engineering, medicine, management, science, commerce, pharmacy and hotel management programmes to over 20,000 students spread across four campuses in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

Although a combination of factors prompts India’s talented youth to flee to more abundant woods and pastures abroad, at the heart of the nationally debilitating brain drain phenomenon is an ossified higher education system which has failed to keep pace with the rest of the world. The large majority of India’s 700 universities and 35,000 colleges offer outdated curricula, time-serving faculty and inadequate infrastructure, albeit at rock-bottom highly subsidised prices. The handful of globally comparable higher ed institutions such as the IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) and IIMs (Indian Institutes of Management) have devised an elite selection system based on stiff examinations which promotes rote learning rendering admission into them near impossible. For instance, last year 1.4 million PCM (physics, chemistry and maths) school-leavers wrote IIT-JEE, of whom a mere 10,000 (less than 1 percent) were admitted into the seven premier IITs and nine fledgling IITs.

YET NOT EVEN THE blue-chip IITs quite measure up internationally. None of them (or any Indian university for that matter) figure in the 2013 league tables of the world’s Top 200 universities published by the London-based Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education. India’s domestically top-notch IITs and universities suffer grievously in comparison not only with western varsities, but also with the best institutions of higher education in Asia. In the QS World University Rankings 2013, the highest ranked Indian university is IIT-Delhi, at #212 and in the THE 2012-13 league tables it’s IIT-Kharagpur (234). On the other hand, several Chinese and Korean universities are ranked among the Top 200.

Little wonder the annual scramble of the expanding Indian middle class for higher study destinations abroad is assuming stampede proportions. Despite the sliding value of the rupee, the number of Indian students emplaning for universities abroad is growing steadily.

According to the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham), the number of Indian students venturing abroad for higher study has risen by 256 percent over the past ten years. Every year, an estimated 800,000 Indian students go abroad, with painful impact on the national exchequer. This annual exodus costs the country $16 billion (Rs.94,152 crore) annually. About 10 million Indian students will seek higher education overseas over the next decade, predicts Assocham.

“Most of India’s universities have been ruined by political interference and nepotism which has stunted their growth and development. Ironically, despite not being on a par with global institutions, the criteria for admission into the country’s premier colleges and universities are so stiff that bright students often find it easier to get into American Ivy League varsities. This drives thousands of Indian students abroad,” says Dr. Abha Pasricha, visiting professor at the department of political science, Hansraj College, Delhi.

INTENSE COMPETITION for admission into the nation’s too few premier higher ed institutions apart, another compelling factor driving students to foreign study destinations is the failure of Indian colleges and universities to design contemporary syllabuses and curriculums which stimulate innovation and problem-solving, and develop academic cultures compatible with the demands of industry in a fast-changing society. Karishma Nair, an MPP (Master of public policy) student at the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, forthrightly condemns pedagogies practiced in India’s classrooms as obsolete and asynchronous with the needs of the job market.

“Compared to India, the western education system is far more evolved and streamlined. Teachers encourage interactive classroom discussion and debates, unlike the soporific lecture format Indian professors follow, and students are assessed through assignments, presentations and essays rather than a final exam. Moreover, teacher-student ratios abroad seldom exceed 1:20, while in India there are over 50 students per classroom. If we had this quality of education back home, I would not have incurred a huge debt to study in Berlin. Now I will have to work abroad to pay back my education loan of Rs.45 lakh,” says Nair, a commerce postgraduate of Mumbai University.

Priyamvada Dalmia, a psychology sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, concurs. “The Indian education system is exams-focused and encourages memorisation while inhibiting critical thinking and problem-solving. Just two years into my undergrad programme in the US, I feel there’s an incredible change in the way I think, learn and analyse problems. Such cognitive development is the most important and useful outcome of Western education. It compels you to think beyond what is taught, to ask questions, and find answers, enabling students to cope and succeed anywhere in the world,” says Dalmia, who completed her schooling in Delhi.

According to Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the erudite president of the Centre for Policy Research, Delhi, the well-known think tank, higher education reform is the prerequisite of stemming the outflow of students abroad. “The supply of good institutions is woefully small, the competition fierce and the structures of pedagogy almost life denying. More of the privileged students will secede from the system by going abroad. Higher education reform is urgently required. But it is going to remain a formidable challenge. The regulatory tangle the courts and government have created, the political economy of vested interests in the system and obduracy in large parts of the academic establishment, have slowed down constructive change. This sector is notoriously hard to change; 15 years of missed opportunities make it hard to drum up confidence that change is imminent,” wrote Mehta in The Indian Express (May 7).

The ills of obsolete syllabuses, poor quality curriculums, outdated pedagogies, political interference and over-regulation are compounded by an under-developed research eco-system. The research output of India’s 700 universities and R&D institutions is almost negligible by world standards.

According to a Thomson Reuters Report (2012), India’s share of global research output is a mere 3.5 percent (cf. the US’ 22 percent and UK’s 15 percent). The report also reveals that genetic engineering and biotechnology are the most under-represented disciplines, with approximately 90 percent of postgraduates in these fields migrating to the US for research. In other STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) disciplines too, over 50 percent of Indian postgraduates opt for research abroad, mostly in the US.

“India has failed to sufficiently invest in R&D, and provide the stimulating academic culture required for students to pursue research. Our universities are mere teaching institutions, with hardly any research output. Given continuous lack of funding, poor lab facilities and questionable quality of guides, we can’t blame postgrads for fleeing to foreign universities. We need a new national research policy which focuses on connecting India’s universities with industry and doubling of national research expenditure,” says S.R. Ahlawat, sociology professor at Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak (Haryana).

Adds Prof. Mahalaya Chatterjee, former head of the economics department at Calcutta University: “Better research facilities, less politicisation of the academic world, merit-based culture, higher pay and excellent working conditions, are the reasons why India’s talented researchers migrate abroad.”

THE FALLOUT OF THE continuous outflow of postgrad and research students to foreign countries and the US in particular, is a severe shortage of qualified faculty in India’s higher education institutions. Across the elite IITs, 43 percent of faculty posts are untenanted while half of faculty positions in the National Institutes of Technology (NITs) and Central universities are vacant.

However, India’s higher education system — particularly undergraduate colleges — has its defenders who argue that a system which produces talented engineers, doctors and scientists, who script success stories around the world, can’t be entirely bad.

“The education system can’t be blamed for the unwillingness of talented Indians to work in the country. Other institutions also play roles in talent retention — government, regulatory authorities, political leadership, society, etc. For instance, most private sector companies are family-dominated which limits the career prospects of professional managers. Moreover, for aspiring entrepreneurs India offers a very hostile business environment as testified by the World Bank’s Global Ease of Doing Business index, whereas it’s so simple to start a business in the US, Europe and even South-east Asia. These are perhaps more important factors behind India’s brain drain phenomenon. The role of the education system is at best marginal,” argues Thillai Rajan, an alumnus of BITS, Pilani and IIM-Bangalore, and currently associate professor, department of management studies at IIT-Madras.

Belatedly as usual, the establishment is becoming aware of the huge loss caused to the exchequer and national development effort by India’s continuous brain drain. In mid-2012, the Union health ministry made it mandatory for all MBBS graduates bound for the US to sign a bond promising to return after completing their studies, failing which the government will deny them permission to practice abroad, a legally doubtful proposition.

Moreover, last year the UPA II government announced a new science, technology and innovation policy (STIP) 2013, which envisages “positioning India among the top five global scientific powers by 2020,” by increasing the number of full-time research and development personnel by 66 percent within five years, and increasing India’s share of published science papers from the current 3.5 to 7 percent by 2020. The policy’s implementation blueprint includes introduction of flexible recruitment policies, generous government research grants, and industry-academia collaboration to attract Indian researchers back from foreign institutions. This policy has reportedly been inspired by a China government initiative of 2013, setting up a $97.5 million (Rs. 575.2 crore) seed fund for 20,000 returnee scientists which has put the country on the R&D world map (see box p.82).

“The new government at the Centre must make higher education reform and investment in research and development its top priority. Currently India spends less than 4 percent of GDP on education and 1 percent on research. These outlays have to be doubled while the corporate sector must be incentivised to fund R&D in universities. A national policy to convert our universities from knowledge dissemination factories to knowledge creation institutions is also urgently required. Moreover, it’s a good idea to introduce a one-time migration tax on professionals migrating abroad which could be 60-70 percent of the expenditure incurred by Indian taxpayers in educating them. The new BJP government must make it a top priority to create conducive education, research and institutional environments to retain talent as well as incentivise our scientists, engineers and doctors to return to India just as China has done,” says Dr. A.S. Seetharamu, former professor of education at the Institute of Social and Economic Change, Bangalore and currently education advisor to the Karnataka government.

If the newly sworn-in BJP government led by prime minister Narendra Modi truly intends to fulfill its promise of transforming India, retention of its brightest and best medical, technical and business management professionals is a necessary precondition.

Yet converting India’s brain drain into brain gain will require coordinated multi-sector initiatives — improving the business climate, eliminating red tape, eradicating corruption, upgrading public facilities and infrastructure, and most importantly reviving the country’s higher education and research systems. It’s a tall order, but not less than what the BJP, which swept General Election 2014 last month, has promised in its manifesto.

With Summiya Yasmeen, Paromita Sengupta (Bangalore); Baishali Mukerjee (Kolkata) & Sunayana Nair (Mumbai)