Indian talent abroad

India matters. That is the one clear take-away when the dust settles on Barack Obama’s visit. Despite all the gloss put on the high profile meetings and breakthroughs, the leader of the world’s largest and newly resurgent economy travelled half way across the world essentially to grace a ceremonial parade.

It is not as if the US president, fighting a recalcitrant Republican Congress with his back to the wall, had time hanging on his hands. So, India matters, and not merely because of strategic and commercial factors, which could have been dealt without the grand spectacle of symbolic significance. India matters because Indians matter.

That was not the case always. India of yore was known for its fabled wealth, silks and spices. Indians were early seafarers and traders. They remained abroad as well, but only sometimes as voluntary migrants.

They were the descendants of indentured labourers. England had South Asians running its textile mills in Bradford and crowding Southall. California had Sikh farmers.  But Indians were not honoured members of the host society anywhere.

All that changed in the last 50 years – and how! I belong to a generation of engineers heading westward in the early 1960s which brought this about. When I first went to the US in 1965 as a graduate student fresh out of Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, it was news that Indians could speak English, leave alone be good engineers.

At the end of our first semesters at leading American schools, many of us had straight A records. Our universities entreated us to recommend more Indians to take in. Thus began the legend of the techie Indian.

But things were not exactly easy in those halcyon days. We were on our own, manifestations of what was rather infelicitously called the brain drain.

PIO, OCI and NRI were just jumbles

of alphabets with one common letter. We were too few and too poor to welcome the new prime minister Indira Gandhi to the US, nor did she consider us worthy of an audience. Jobs were available in those booming years of the American age of technology, albeit not the best ones.

Indian engineers did well at Boeing and GE not because they believed their ancestors flew aircraft millennia earlier but by mastering modern aeronautics. They slogged in steel, petrochemicals, electrical and car factories, steadily rising in the corporate hierarchy, bagging patents along the way, not because of their ancestry but because of their ingenuity.

As did the increasing number of doctors, who diligently honed and performed modern techniques and procedures, not making fanciful claims of Indians of antiquity having invented them.

They were the ladder on which later generations climbed to the top of their professions and broke the glass ceilings. This ascendancy of Americans of Indian origin would not have been possible but for the signal role of the pioneers.

Rise of the IT giant

In 1985, Rajiv Gandhi invited Satyanarayan Pitroda, a self-made telecommunications entrepreneur of Chicago to advise him. In no time, district towns were all hooked up. Call booths mushroomed. With falling tariffs, telephony was within everybody’s reach. My friend Kirit Bakshi of Detroit brought personal computers to India. He also set up a chain of centres to impart training

for programming and computer languages. Because of him and Pitroda, India was poised to take advantage of the Y2K opportunity, using the vast army of underqualified engineers. The rest, as they say, is history of India’s blooming as an IT giant.

In the 1990s, scientific entrepreneurs Dr Anji Reddy and Dr Parvinder Singh cloned generic off-patent molecules using similar armies of underqualified chemists. They sold these drugs at a fraction of what they used to cost.

Laksmi Niwas Mittal employed engineers stagnating in Indian public sector steel works to turn around a slew of moribund steel mills worldwide and climbed to the top. Anil Agrawal, a scrap dealer who never went to college, displayed remarkable tenacity and judgment to emerge as a global leader in the non-ferrous minerals business, including oil.

These recent successes show that Indians in India as well as emigrants overcame the dearth of capital and opportunities through intellect and innovation.

The much-misused phrase, thinking out of the box, defined Indians, be they scientists attempting Mars landing on a shoestring budget, computer geeks in Silicon Valley or Bengaluru, technocrats in Fortune 500 corporations or metallurgy colossi straddling the global stage.

The veteran diplomat K Shankar Bajpai recently bemoaned that at Plassey in 1757, “Just 3,000 [British] men dispersed nearly 1,00,000 [Indians]... A handful of islanders needing over six months to reach us, took us over in bits and pieces because we lacked their organisation, discipline, conscientiousness – and, above all, their modernity” (“Nightmare of unreason”, The Indian Express, January 19, 2015). His anguish is understandable.

But 190 years later, the same islanders were sent home by a frail man without guns and regiments. He used a subversive, innovative idea: unite a subcontinent to demand freedom through non-violent struggle.

A fitting remembrance and tribute to that most famous Pravasi Bhartiya’s return a century ago would be to banish obscurantism by espousing innovation and ideas.

Good ideas are like forest fires. They spread on their own and become all-consuming. Better, faster, safer and cheaper are the watchwords of the modern global economic Olympiad. Together they constitute innovation.

India can certainly use it to build smart cities, a string of ports or providing affordable medical care to everyone, priority concerns all, of this government and others to come in the future. Without a doubt, a wealth of experience and information exists among Indians everywhere, on these and other related issues. That is our Republic of ideas.

(The writer was a professor at IIM-Ahmedabad)