This Obsession with Brain Drain

S. NARAYANASWAMY
Formerly Member, Legislative Council, Madras

Too many people have been talking too vaguely about brain drain. Some of them know that there is nothing much you can do about it–unless some obscurantists and chauvinists suggest the cessation of passport issues. Others know it is not so bad for the country after all–with so many highly-qualified specialists finding no appropriate outlets and being bottled up here – and generally functioning in deep frustration. There is a great deal of hypocrisy in this talk about brain drain – with particularly many politicians who tend to be rather articulate on this subject – having sons or daughters safely ensconced in well-remunerated assignments in distant and less-known centres of corporate activity or research in U. S. The Sophoclean irony of it all is that some of these boys and girls are employees in multi-national corporations of U. S. or Canada, West Germany or France – what time their parents who are either legislators or ministers purport to believe that multi-nationals are some species of Malaysian pythons that get the under-developed countries in their coils and strangulate them.

The simple fact about this so-called brain drain is that boys with more than average intelligence or of exceptional mental calibre, whose parents are able to obtain a seat in one of the many American universities and have the means to sustain them financialy in these expensive academic centres (that usually charge frightening sums as semester fees, which many American parents frankly admit they cannot afford) usually take all the needed trouble to get them out of India. Indeed it happens that in that land of intense specialization, they take up academic courses that have little application in India or in any case, have little relevance in the current state of industrial development. When they finished acquiring the B. Sc. or M.Sc., and have done reasonably well, their professors induce them to work for doctorates and this is usually a signal to the parents that they, the boys or girls, propose to extend their stay by another three or four years. Sometimes, they are able to obtain scholarships and the parents get some relief from the massive remittances needed to sustain their offspring in these exotic environments. Once they have done even their Master’s Degrees boys or girls look out for industrial or research assignments, and locate them. They persuade their parents they are far better off there than they could hope to be in their home country and the parents, who have a somewhat cynical awareness of the narrow range of employment opportunities that are available in India and indeed of the measly remuneration offered by even the larger corporate bodies–do nothing to discourage their children's programme to make extended stays in these distant countries. They often tell you in private with understandable glee and satisfaction about how well the boy or girl is faring–how great is the esteem and affection in which their professors or employees hold these talented youngsters and how cruel it would be to rip them off the new ground, where they have taken sound root. Indeed the young people come over to India for vacations or sabbatical trips, usually borne on low-priced special charters arranged by enterprising aviation companies, that build up long-term clientele that way. When they come to their drab and not always well-appointed Indian homes, they feel very uncomfortable. When they go round seeing industrial units or call on managers on the advice of parents, who try to find domestic placements for the boys–in the hope or having their children near them–they discourse to you on the obsolescence of plant and machinery or the rigidity of management outlook or of the conspicuous lack of research and development facilities and lastly, of the ridiculous remuneration offered. The fond father can have little to say in defence of the Indian actualities, of whose many grim facets he has a full awareness and finally, lets the boy or girl go to their second homes–and hopes they will cover themselves with professional glory and live in exotic comfort. Very often, these people return to India on short leave to get married and go –with parents having done what may be called the ground-work-that helps with getting the wedding bells to ring speedily.

Usually, there is little difficulty in this matter, as far too many parents have got into the habit of looking across the seven seas for the prospective husbands, who can be deemed good enough for their highly-educated and Scarlett O-Hara-like daughters (here again comparisons are rarely ever with Indian beauties) and generally collect data about American-staying Indian boys. It is amazing what a comprehensive job they do. So that there can be no surprise about the lightning visits the boys make, the lightning speed of wedding arrangements made, particularly with so many hotels bending wards to give all the facilities for a reasonable fee, reducing the entire exercise to the writing out of a single cheque by the girl’s father–and finally, the abrupt vanishing trick the boys make, with crucial date-lines to be kept with the distant employer.

The fact is that the parent who is a legislator or minister tends to be silent and discreet and never plays up the fact that the son (sometimes it is more than one son) is settled abroad and that he has done export promotion of family talent.

Only the public get to know about this when something out of the way happens–as in the case of late Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, President of India, when he passed away abruptly and both his Son and his daughter had to come from the U.S.–where they were staying and at least one was fully settled.

It is better we take a sensible view of this problem–with an objective understanding of the unflattering conditions in India. In the last three or four years in particular, we have had a marked slackening in the pace of industrial build-up–or in the expansion of our service sectors. The pressure on our agricultural economy is mounting gravely indeed. Many farm-families are proliferating too fast–and the patriarchal land holding of 40 years ago, of say 15 acres, that sustained 5 persons, cannot today sustain 30 persons nor even occupy all the able-bodied adults among them physically on farm effort. The result is townward movement of rural population in search of opportunities of gainful employment. We all know that only a quickened pulse of economic activity, massive investment in well-distributed centres of production can solve subsisting problems of acute unemployment. We are proliferating meantime, at the rate of 1.25 million a month or 15 million a year–effectively incorporating 1-1¼  Australias into India every year, population-wise. In this ground, to discourage outflow of talented persons who are willingly absorbed by countries that can do with more man-cum-brain power is merely to invite trouble–particularly when we can offer no similar high-level job opportunities or facilities for research within the country.

What is equally important to remember is that for every one person of high calibre we send out, there are perhaps 25 more of similar or superior calibre still functioning and perhaps struggling to find gainful careers in the country. Instead of wasting our time and energy on this futile warwhoop about brain drain, our politicians and public men should take steps to retain the brilliant and the brainy, who have not still departed from India. They are an incredibly large number, who are biting the bullet of deep frustration. The fact is that we are all too dependent on other countries, in the matters tries, in the matter of discovering talent–because we have a habit of raising hullulijah when an Indian student of Princeston, Harvard or Berkely University gets an international award–and we are too proud and vainglorious to admit our incompetence to identify talent indigenously. Indeed we all tend to make light of the work our boys and girls do in indigenous national laboratories or in industrial research centres; even as we refuse to recognize quality in Indian products, even when this is painstakingly achieved. The built-in snobbery that we have all cultivated–in accepting something from abroad as authentic and most of what is indigenous as phoney or un-usable–which is revealed in the large quantum of foreign gadgets that go into opulent homes and which command ridiculously high prices–is behind all our present unwholesome psychology, though this will be strenuously denied by our politicians.

Our effort should be to create the economic and intellectual infrastructure–by broadbasing industrial build-up, and the service-sectors–which alone would help us to retain the superb human material within the country, and obviate massive migration of the cream of our intellectuals and managerial men and our scientists.

What we are presently doing is indulgence in a pathetic contradiction. We are asking the Company Law Department to prune the salaries of our Managing Directors and corporate managers to the levels of Secretaries’ salaries–and this has led to much lip-biting by our top-level managers of proved merit. Whatever satisfaction our legislators and bureaucrats may derive from this effort to cut down corporate emoluments, this will only aggravate the pace of talent-migration to countries, that are willing to hire their services on far more attractive terms. The Middle-East is an instance in point–with engineers and technicians opting for service there, despite climatic discomforts and inflation in living costs. The oil-rich Arab countries have caused for India both brain and brawn drain–though we do not complain of the latter.

The present wooly-headed outcry about brain drain has pulled no punches–judging by the crowds outside U. S. and West German Consular Offices–waiting for visas to be issued and by the deluge of passport applications handled by the Regional Passport Offices in recent months. We have more people going out now than ever before–notwithstanding reports of industrial recession in many Western countries.

Let us do something to help with quickening the developmentpace and concentrate on it–even as post-stamp-sized countries like Taiwan and South Korea have done–instead of ploughing the arid sands of futile discussions about brain drain. The examples of the two small countries referred to–which have overtaken us in the growth-cum-development race–should at least bring home to us one wholesome lesson where purposeless debate ends and where and how soon hard work begins.