In developing countries like India, Pakistan, or the ones in Africa, new ideas tend to meet with greater resistance than in developed nations. New ideas disrupt the system. Developing countries are by default conventional.
The US continues to be the wealthiest nation in the world because Americans are more open to new ideas than any other nation. They are inured to things changing, and usually, they change for the better.
A country open to original ideas creates space for them; a new market opens up. A country closed to ideas creates frustration, false stability, and inevitably, corruption. There would be much respect to the face—and daggers sticking in the back. So those who can, up and leave. Which explains why over 50 percent of IIT talents find a perch in the US alone.
There, they become well-employed and send a pittance home. If we had succeeded in retaining them, we would be a scientific and entrepreneurial nation and get all of it. In 2022, foreign remittances to India stood at $100 billion. Imagine what we might have achieved if this country had provided a decent work and life environment for the talented.
India ranks as one of the largest exporters of human capital worldwide. In 2022, over 5,60,000 skilled Indians migrated to OECD countries, marking a 30 percent increase from the previous year, according to International Migration Outlook, 2022. The US, UK and Canada were the top destinations. Canada alone has granted permanent residency to over 2,26,000 Indians in the past decade.
So our foreign remittance grows based on the talent we effectively kill at home. And we try to compensate for it by celebrating the Sundar Pichais and Satya Nadellas of the world as Indians when they have long ceased to be.
Kerala, a state that never misses a chance to thump its chest about its perceived greatness, sends out even its young by hordes. The annual number of students going to Canada alone averages 20,000. Over 2 million Malayalis work in the Persian Gulf region.
No matter which party is in power, it is now clear Kerala cannot be an entrepreneurial state. Run on feudal oil money, the state and its people continue to delude themselves that they are in a permanent state of revolution. A collective hallucination is the Kerala model of reality.
For India, the exporting of human capital is the wrong thing to do, especially in these times when innovation is everything. Consider our neighbour China and the competition it is offering the world. While India struggles with brain drain, China is experiencing ‘brain circulation’: emigrants are returning with expertise and capital. Chinese pay, other incentives, and living standards in cities are beginning to be compatible with the West. As a result, in engineering and enterprise, China is about to overtake the rest of the world.
Take for example the crucial field of computing. The race all over the developed world is to make the leap from digital computing to quantum computing. Quantum computing, according to physicist Michio Kaku, is so powerful that its applications across every field—medicine, education, engineering, and AI—are likely to completely change the way we look at ourselves and the universe. In quantum computing, Kaku says, China is a league or two ahead of Google, Microsoft and IBM.
China is partly able to achieve this because of its determination to make things at home. The ghar waapsi trend among its expatriates, who run into their millions, certainly helps. Add to it a growing number of foreign professionals drawn by the opportunities China offers.
India, on the other hand, attracts a negligible number of skilled foreigners. It is a reliable index of our irrelevance in the global scale of things. This country has never been good at attracting foreign talent—unless you consider the colonial era.
At present, India hosts only under 50,000 skilled foreign workers. For the fifth largest economy in the world, this is a disproportionately low number. Just shows how attractive India is to live and work. Recently, a man considered dead woke up as his ambulance hit a bump on the road.
All this might explain why India has made absolutely no original contribution to the world of ideas and patents. Every single thing we have, from rat poison to rockets, was first made abroad. This mediocrity is congenital to even the business billionaires we venerate. Their research and development wings have invented very little besides adapting outdated—and therefore relatively cheap—foreign technology to Indian conditions.
Nevertheless, the political debates in India continue to be around things that happened centuries ago. When was the last time you heard a great speech on science, corporate affairs or education? We are still looking for remnants of temples under mosques or the other way round when we should be looking at the stars. As of now, the only thing growing sky-high are GST rates.
The present regime is so tax-centric that it is annihilating enterprise. The tax regime militates against ideas that can create innovation and wealth. As a result, deals are increasingly struck and money paid in places like Dubai, which is tax-friendly. Capital is in flight.
Year 2047 is made out to be the magical one when India will be ‘fully developed’. Not if we can help it. To be sure, there would be one or two golden eggs. But the goose would be truly dead and dusted.
(Views are personal)
C P Surendran
Poet, novelist, and screenplay writer. His latest novel is One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)