Reverse Gear: Indian talent now out of US imitation

Time has now changed, as highest taxpayers of India has gone done by the so called ‘brain drain’ . If we take a look from the 50years back to now, As many of the engineers trained at the Prestigious Indian institutes of Technology (IIT) 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. 84% graduates of this 2008 batch have chosen to remain in India. “The drop in the number of IITians who believe the US offers a ‘better standard of living’ has been remarkable, from 13% to almost zero,” says Alok Aggarwal, an alumnus of the IIT in New Delhi. 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 ’02 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. “India turned out world-class engineers and scientists for decades before its economy took off.
Changing Destination:
The changing career destination of IIT students has important ramifications for both India as well as the US. 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 US 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 , is an IIT Delhi graduate. Arun Sarin, chief executive officer at Britain’s Vodafone Group, 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. The study showed that from 1995 to ’05, 26% of all the US 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 US is still very powerful. However, even here there’s a problem. Thanks to a multiyear wait for permanent-residency status in the US, there is the potential for a “reverse brain-drain” of skilled workers, say the Duke-Berkeley researchers. US 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 US works harder to retain the talent that eventually comes its way.