Quit India

Bugbear of the brain drain has resurfaced, but its causes need questioning 

 A social media post has again raised the bogey of the brain drain, the outflow of the highly educated from our state-subsidised IITs and IIMs to foreign shores, there to enrich other countries at the expense of the Indian taxpayer.

The post highlights what amounts to asset-stripping of the Indian economy to benefit the adoptive countries of the highly qualified migrants.

The reason the writer adduces for this post-Independence ‘Quit India’ movement is monetary gain: The paycheque of an entry-level technocrat in say, US, is some 15 times that of a counterpart in India.

The post decries this outward tide as putting pecuniary gain over patriotism, placing personal advancement over the national interest.

The writer likens this transfer of value to a form of neo-colonialism in which the colonising powers, the so-called First World, plunder developing countries like India not of material resources, as former colonists did, but of the incalculably more valuable fund of intellectual capital.

However, while former colonists took their loot by force of arms, today’s expropriators do so with the more than willing consent of migrants. Is the keen edge of greed the only, or even the major, motivation that induces the migrant to cut loose the main-stay anchor of home and chance the terra incognita of foreign shores?

Could there be, apart from the pull factor of financial benefit, also a push impetus that impels those who quit India?

The greater part of the Great Indian Diaspora is composed of low-skilled labour drawn by the prospect of monetary gain.  But the highly-educated, who turn their backs on their home country, might have other reasons for doing so.

Could these include a desperation to forsake a climate in which, increasingly, the innovative and the unconventional are stifled by sectarian ideology, and a once shared inclusive identity is fragmented with exclusionary fissures of creed, caste and language?

Love for one’s country is laudable, as is the reciprocal love the country must bear for all those who call it home, and not just for those who constitute a brute majority.

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