Editorial: The offshoring of India’s brilliance

Politicians and tech moguls have hailed the brainpower that India brings to the international technology space. Even geek guru Elon Musk said the USA greatly benefits from Indian talent, replying to a tweet that mentioned the likes of Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella. While the fanfare is well-deserved, it might be recalled that IT professionals of Indian origin have been making strides globally for several decades now. Venture capitalist Vinod Dham, who in the 90s pioneered the development of Intel’s next-generation microprocessor, is known as the father of the Pentium chip. On the software side, Vinod Khosla incepted Sun Microsystems, with fellow Stanfordians back in the early 80s. The company was the birthplace of the programming language Java. Other superstars include Sabeer Bhatia, the founder of the world’s first ISP-agnostic email service Hotmail, taken over by Microsoft for an unheard-of sum in 1997.

Parsing through this timeline of achievements, one realises nothing has changed in India in the last 40 years. The frontrunners of innovation found the West to be a rewarding conduit for their risk-taking abilities, their bent for research, and maximisation of their talents from the 70s and well into the millennium as well. India’s higher education institutes, including the IITs, funded by taxpayer’s money, instilled in them fundamentals of science, tech, and academic rigour. And then, they bore witness to these gifted youngsters opting for foreign universities, in pursuit of research and better growth opportunities. At times, funded by scholarships, and at times, by loans that get converted into foreign exchange at cash registers of haloed institutions, such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and MIT, they eventually end up staying back in the host nation.

Twitterati pointed out how India even permitted such an exodus of brilliant minds, and why has it failed to create adequate opportunities at home? The answers have been often deliberated, and ultimately put to rest in a nation, that prides itself on being the birthplace of educational landmarks such as Takshashila and Nalanda, but falters when ensuring the longevity of students within its own educational institutes. As per a survey conducted by the National Statistical Office (NSO), one out of every eight students enrolled in a school or college drops out before completing their education. On top of this, over 62 per cent of all dropouts occur at the school level. The causes can be narrowed down to the annual budgetary allocations as part of GDP that is directed towards education.

India must spend 6% of its GDP on education, a recommendation reiterated by every national education policy (NEP) since 1968. Unfortunately, 52 years since then, in 2019-20, we spent only 3.1% of our GDP on education, as per the 2019-20 Economic Survey.

It’s also worth examining the avenues graduates in India have when it comes to pursuing research and contributing through innovation and deep learning, pursuits that require significant funding. The Centre spent roughly 0.7% of its GDP on federal R&D compared to a global average of 2.3% in 2018, according to UNESCO. Thankfully, our 2021-22 budget proposal made mention of strengthening our in-house National Research Foundation with significant funding while prioritising biotech and health research.

We are acutely aware of the poor learning outcomes of the Indian education system. And while slogans like Make in India make for wonderful optics, the promises are made on a shaky ground of higher education. To teach, train and retain talent, an immense effort is needed to overhaul the system itself. Until then, we will have to make our peace with celebrating such success stories, based on the offshoring model.