1. In the early years of IIT-s, up to 1970-s, the graduates had limited
opportunities in placements within India or for higher studies, and had to
leave the shores of India for better opportunities and US was a natural
destination, where merit and performance was the only consideration without
favouritism or reservations as in India.
2. It is wrong to say that these departures of IIT graduates or doctors were
a brain drain for India. In fact, India was creating the assets of better
doctors and technologists by getting exposure to modern facilities available
there.
If you find now hundreds of Indians occupying enviable positions in
multinationals or in software industry in U.S., it was because of such move by
qualified IIT-ians and others to advanced Countries. A Nooyi or Samir Bhatia
would not have happened if they were trapped within India, under the Political
and bureaucratic webs restraining their advancement.
Again India has been receving remittances from day 1 of these NRI-s which has
been phenomenally increasing all these years as an important component of our
FE earnings.
3. Our National laboratories and Universities are run more on bureaucratic
manipulations and Scientists have less freedom to work freely in their
confines. The suicide of many Scientists of ICAR in the 1960-70s under
Swaminathan is a case point where brilliant researchers were not allowed to
work freely.
4. Many of the NRI-s who attained technical knowhow have come back to India
and set up projects for the benefit of the Country.
With the economic development of India, esp. outsourcing entrepreneurs
dominating the World, many NRI-s feel the opening up of economy and modern
facilities available to India attractive and the reverse flow has started now.
The book "World is Flat" describing how "water finds its own level" or the
economies moving from West to East to reduce the disparities is more observed
now than in the past.
Jharkhand Blog <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Jharkhand Blog
For almost 50 years, the hard-earned money of India's taxpayers has gone down
the ``brain drain'' as many of the engineers trained at the prestigious Indian
Institutes of Technology went overseas and didn't return.
That is now changing.
The supply of top-end technical talent by Indian universities is beginning to
create its own domestic demand: The class that graduates from the seven IITs
this month will mostly stay home -- or return after short stints abroad -- and
pay back the nation's investment, according to a survey by Evalueserve, a New
Delhi-based business-research company.
Every third alumnus of the IITs went abroad from 1964 to 2001, mostly to the
U.S.; out of the more-recent graduates -- including the Class of 2008 -- 84
percent have chosen to remain in India, the survey says.
The post- and pre-2001 groups have very different attitudes.
``The drop in the number of IITians who believe the U.S. offers a `better
standard of living' has been remarkable, from 13 percent to almost zero,'' says
Alok Aggarwal, author of the report and an alumnus of the IIT in New Delhi.
India's example, which has great relevance for policy makers in developing
nations, clearly shows that the relationship between education and growth isn't
a one-way street: More of the former doesn't always produce more of the latter.
Sometimes the economy has to cross a threshold level of development before
the investment in human resources -- especially higher education -- starts
producing results.
Demand and Supply
India, which set up its first IIT in 1951, had to wait until 2002 before the
promise of rapid economic growth -- and new industries and companies that were
born as a result of that expansion -- pushed up demand for top talent to a
point where the country could begin to absorb a greater proportion of the
domestic supply.
``Education may influence the economy in subtle ways, interacting with other
factors,'' says the Commission on Growth and Development, a group of business
and government leaders led by Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence.
``India turned out world-class engineers and scientists for decades before
its economy took off,'' the commission said in a report released last month.
Yet, this investment in skills yielded limited economic results, says the
commission, ``until India discovered a global demand for software services, a
demand which has since broadened to include outsourced research-and-development
and a wide array of services delivered over the Internet.''
``India, in short, had to solve a demand-and-supply problem, not just a
supply problem,'' the commission said.
Changing Destination
The changing career destination of IIT students has important ramifications
for both India as well as the U.S.
Each year, the IITs award about 4,000 undergraduate diplomas. Typically, one
out of four alumni surveyed by Evalueserve has gone on to start a company.
Others have become top executives at multinational companies or have opted to
teach in top U.S. and European universities. In other words, the direct
economic output of IIT graduates has accrued overwhelmingly to the developed
economies.
Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Santa Clara, California-based Sun Microsystems
Inc., is an IIT Delhi graduate. Arun Sarin, chief executive officer at
Britain's Vodafone Group Plc, studied at IIT Kharagpur. Narendra Karmarkar, the
mathematician who wrote a linear-programming algorithm that bears his name,
graduated from IIT Bombay.
Economic Implications
As more of this top talent stays home now, domestic entrepreneurship in India
is going to receive a big boost. Almost half of the respondents in the
Evalueserve survey see entrepreneurial ventures emerging as the best career
option for IIT graduates by 2017.
Such optimism for entrepreneurship bodes well for India because it shows that
the supply of senior business leaders -- which could quickly become a
constraint in a high-growth economy -- won't dry up, says Aggarwal.
And what will be the ramifications for the U.S.?
A three-part study by researchers at Duke University and University of
California at Berkeley offers some interesting clues. The study showed that
from 1995 to 2005, 26 percent of all the U.S. technology and engineering
companies started by immigrants had Indian founders.
Will the source of this entrepreneurship disappear? Not so soon. Standard of
living isn't the only, or even the biggest, motivator for an undergraduate
engineer in India planning a career. The lure of graduate education in the U.S.
is still very powerful.
However, even here there's a problem.
Thanks to a multiyear wait for permanent-residency status in the U.S., there
is the potential for a ``reverse brain-drain'' of skilled workers, say the
Duke-Berkeley researchers.
U.S. education and immigration policy makers must pay close attention to the
changing destination of IIT graduates. The surplus that India will export will
dwindle even as the U.S. works harder to retain the talent that eventually
comes its way.
bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&refer=columnist_mukherjee&sid=a4nDoUoP4kqI
Super 30
Famous as maths wizard Anand Kumar who once sold 'papad' on the streets to
eke out a living is a happy man today with all the 30 aspirants of IIT-JEE from
his coaching institute, Super 30, making it to premier IITs.
Kumar, who runs the coaching institute with Additional Director General of
Police Abhayanand, set it up in 2003 for providing free coaching and boarding
to students from economically weak backgrounds.
The number of students from the institute who made it to the IIT rose from 18
in 2003 to 22 in 2004, 26 in 2005, 28 each in 2006 and 2007 to 30 aspirants
this year.
Chief Minister Nitish Kumar congratulated the students of Super 30 and also
Sithikant, a student of St Michael's High School in Patna, who topped the All
India Merit List for IIT-JEE this year.
"Bihar is rising and the renaissance has begun. Sithikant and students of
Super 30, will inspire future aspirants," Kumar said in his message.
Anand's house at Kathpulwa on the outskirts of the state capital wore a
festive look with parents of children who cracked the IIT JEE distributed
sweets to everyone in the area.
ADGP Abhayanand who teaches physics at the institute told PTI, "We
shortlisted some 30 students and coached them for the All India Engineer
Entrance Examination (AIEEE) and all of them made to the IIT list. We will
increase the number of AIEEE students from the next batch".
economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/News_By_Industry/Services/Education/Bihar_students_make_
it_to_IITs_with_help_from_maths_wizard/articleshow/3088579.cms
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