Brain Drain from India : "Better a brain drain than a drain in the brain"

Brain Drain from India

Let me firstly explain what is Brain Drain by giving an example, As we all know that there was a recent news that Twitter's Jack Dorsey had announced that he would be stepping down from his role and Parag Agarwal, who is an IIT-Bombay pass out will be joining as the new CEO there are many more such examples of an Indian origin person becoming the CEO of an foreign company like Satya Nadela becoming the CEO of Microsoft after 2014, Sundar Pichai becoming the CEO of Alphabet in 2015, Santanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe since 2007, Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM in 2020 and many more, this is something we Indian's are really proud about becoming successful and proving ourselves in other countries, but also at the same time some people give it the name of „‟Brain Drain‟. On this even Elon Musk tweeted by saying that 'USA benefits greatly from Indian talent!' even though this does not sound good to hear, but still this tweet has some bitter truth, because over more than 6 lakh Indians have given up Indian citizenship since 2017 and over more than 3 crore people have migrated to other countries in spite of the pandemic; now one must be thinking that out of the 135 crore population of the country even if 3 crores have left then what's the big deal! but according to the Global Wealth Migration Review 7000 ultra-rich Indians left the country in 2019 & India ranks 2nd in terms of the places that the rich are leaving after China, how is this important? these were the people who had the capability of creating job opportunities or employment, thereby helping the country in terms of hundreds of crores of taxes and also boosting the economy through which the foreign countries are being benefitted now.

Now, a what are the reasons behind this Brain Drain? Why every educated Indian thinks of settling in the foreign!, why it is being said that Indian Entrepreneurs are on the Run? & what is it that the foreign countries have and India doesn't? Most of us blame caste reservation for Brain drain but truly it has no role to play in it. One might find n number of examples of a person of Indian origin becoming the CEO o a , foreign company in countries like America -   is also called the land of opportunities, Europe but there are hardly such examples in Asian countries like  China, which japan, UAE and even India. This is because Asian countries have a closed culture and the people are not readily accepting or we can say that European countries have accepted the ideology of Cosmopolitanism while Asian countries have not, this culture is so closed in India that even an Indian hardly gets a chance of becoming the CEO of an Indian company and the reason is that most of the Indian Companies have a family business like Adani, Tata, Birla, Bajaj, Mahindra & only family members have the rights to the top positions in the company this also shows lack of meritocracy because for an IIT graduate it is tougher becoming the CEO of Bajaj, Mahindra than becoming the CEO of Google.

There is also a point which needs to be noted that there is no such Indian Institute labor ranks in the top 100 of QS World University Rankings, so the students are always in the flight mode for higher education; And also one interesting point to note that all the Indian CEO's have an Engineering background either in the software or the IT field so it can be interpreted that there is high scope of Engineering in India but that's not the ground reality; according to a survey of Aspiring minds 95% engineers in India are unfit for software development jobs and the same kind of review was received from the CEO of Tech Mahindra. The reason behind in  drain of skinned the brain can also be due to the wage gap as according to the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) the average wages abroad are 3-4 times than in  more th an India, and there are many more such reasons including lifestyle and healthcare facilities why Brain Drain in India is increasing rapidly. India also suffers from Brain Drain due to casteism, communalism, regionalism & nepotism.

In the early 1990's there was new concept was introduced called the 'reverse brain drain' at the time when India's economy was at its peak while the developed countries were struggling with their economy, but today the conditions are different, still,1990s the government can take some basic steps to reverse brain drain, In conclusion, I would like to say that Brain Drain is better than Drain in the Brain by which I mean that there is no use of making people stay in the country and asking them to look for opportunities within the country only. If people feel that there are more opportunities abroad where they can better utilize their talent then they should be allowed to do so and not forced to use their talents only in India, because instead of wasting talent it is better that it is used somewhere & The focus should be on building better opportunities rather than reducing them and developing the country.”

~Chirag Ferwani