Lilowala was a mid-level bank officer in Mumbai. This writer would meet him at the Campion School gates when it was time to pick up their respective sons. One day Lilowala disappeared. Word went out the whole family had migrated to Canada. He only returned to sell off their small apartment in South Mumbai’s crowded market area called ‘Fort’. This was in the early 1990s when it was still easy to migrate to that talent-starved country.
Then there was Prem Bhadur, who worked as the cook and odd job man for this writer’s sister, an Indian diplomat based in Manhattan, New York. In 2000, she sadly passed away in the prime of her career. Prem Bhadur, then on a diplomatic passport, was required to come back to India. But he didn’t. He melted away working as a construction site supervisor and becoming part of the US’ vast army of ‘illegal’ workers.
These were some of the early pioneers who broke free. They won appreciation at their daring; and later they invited jealousy when they got fat salaries in the early infotech exodus. Some left for better business and professional opportunities, and a better life; others are escaping political and social suffocation at home.
But now it’s a stampede. Last year, in calendar 2022, 2,25,620 people renounced their Indian citizenship, the government said in the Rajya Sabha on February 10. Since 2011, as many as 16 lakh people have legally let go of their ‘Indian’ status. Significantly, the number has almost doubled last year from the 1.22 lakh who gave up their citizenship in 2011.
Brain drain again
India had the largest diaspora in the world with 18 million people of Indian origin outside their homeland, a 2020 UN report says. The biggest host countries are the United Arab Emirates (3.5 million), the US (2.7 million) and Saudi Arabia (2.5 million). Australia, Canada, Kuwait and the United Kingdom are the other popular spots.
The Middle East – Saudi, the UAE, Kuwait – have always been the magnets for blue collar working people desperate to find work and give their families a better deal. However, it is the US which has been the favourite destination of the educated classes.
“Indians represent the second largest U.S. immigrant group, after Mexicans and ahead of Chinese and Filipinos. The 2.7 million Indian immigrants living in the United States as of 2021 made up 6% of the total foreign-born population, and their numbers continue to grow,” says the US’ Migration Policy Institute Journal in its 7 December 2022 edition.
“Unlike predominately low-skilled migrant workers who arrived from India during the 19th century and the early 20th century, most post-World War II Indian migrants came to work in professional jobs or study in U.S. colleges and universities… These pathways are reflected in characteristics that set Indians apart: four-fifths of Indian immigrant adults have at least a bachelor’s degree and their median household incomes are more than double those of all immigrants and the U.S. born,” says the journal.
This is Brain Drain 2.0 for India. In the 1980s and 90s there was great angst about the loss of talent to western academia, to foreign management pools and to the US tech industry. But then the situation stabilized with private and public Indian corporates offered both matching opportunities and money to Indian talent.This seems to have now ebbed. There is an unstated frustration among professionals who see more of crony capitalism and a suffocating future in India.
Desperate journeys
Besides the loss of human capital, it is a net revenue loss for the country. Since 2014, since the BJP took over at the Centre, it is estimated that 23,000 dollar millionaires have left the country, many of them ‘buying’ new citizenship in places as far apart as Portugal and Barbados. Many countries have residence-through-investment programmes, and applications have been multiplying from India for schemes like the US’ EB-5 visa and Portugal’s ‘Golden Visa’. With these exits, the country has lost business acumen and tax revenue.
Beyond the official figures of those who gave up their citizenship, there are those millions who have undertaken desperate journeys. They don’t figure in the records and have vanished into the blue. Some made it, some didn’t. Pradeep Saini and his brother Vijay, car mechanics from Punjab and hounded as ‘terrorists’, took a British Airways flight to Heathrow London airport in October 1996 hiding in the wheel bay. Pradeep made it. Vijay died of frostbite.
There is similarly little record of human smuggling, a multi-billion dollar industry. Jagdish Patel, his wife, and two children aged 3 and 11, from Dingucha village, Gujarat’s Gandhinagar district,are among the victims. Travelling on tourist visas they tried to cross the US border on foot from Manitoba, Canada on the night of January 19, last year but the temperature dropped to – 35 deg C and the family tragically froze to death on an open field.
What triggers these dangerous journeys? At a broader level, is anybody acknowledging there is a serious brain drain on? If so, is anything being done to reverse it?