|
BUSINESS
Brain drain: a major threat to Indian economy
By
Devajit Mahanta
Before we truly digest the process of brain drain, we must first of
all, explore its meaning. What is brain drain? Whose brains are being
drained? The term brain drain designates the international transfer of
resources in the form of human capital, that is, the migration of
relatively educated individuals from developing to developed countries. The
development impact of skilled migration from poor countries has long been a
contentious issue. Scholars are even far from consensus on the narrower
question: What is the impact on innovation when a poor country loses a
large fraction of its science and engineering workforce through emigration?
One school of thought argues that such talent is often wasted at home.
Migration to more supportive environments raises global innovation, and
some gains flow back to the poor country through the imports of products
with improved technology or lower cost. However, another school of thought
focuses on the importance of domestic technology innovators. Brain drain in
this submission does not mean the migration of just the highly skilled but
simply, the migration of a percentage of the tertiary-educated
(college-educated) population from developing to developed countries. It
was fashionable since 1992s (just after economic liberalization and
globalization) refer to the migration of trained doctors, scientists and
engineers to the advanced industrialized countries as a “brain drain.” Actually,
it was a “resource drain” rather than a “brain drain.” These scarce
resources are lost to the economy when used to train brains that eventually
migrate. The British Council, which administers the bulk of scholarships to
Indian students applying for higher studies in Britain,
their press office in Delhi
says that 27,000 Indians received student visas in 2007, registering on
average, an increase of more than 10 per cent a year. I visited one such
foreign education trade fair in Delhi
not long ago. Nearly hundred stalls were set up in a large ground with
several thousand visitors milling from door to door and being solicited by
hard selling college counselors, many armed with pocket calculators for
rapid rupee-to-dollar conversions to work out minimum costs. The US
Educational Foundation in India
reports that since 1997-98 the number of students from India has soared, registering double-digit
growth in several years and overtaking China
as the leading nation to send foreign students to America in
2001-2002.
Moreover, according to AnnLee Saxenian, dean of the School of Information,
University of California, today’s highly skilled migrants circulate between
the US and India, creating technology businesses and spreading prosperity
along the way. If this is the case, it is important to figure how to bring
the prosperity back to India.
The brain drain increases the scarcity of highly needed skilled labourers
in India
and consequently reduces long-run economic growth and income. In addition,
if highly educated workers continue to migrate to richer countries, public
funds spent on higher education in order to promote growth may be to a
large extent inefficiently applied and better spent on sound and widespread
basic education to foster domestic economic development. Just like capital
flight from poor economies to the rich ones, the migration of trained
manpower, human capital flight, is enormously expensive. When a trained
engineer migrates to the US,
it is totally indistinguishable from a gift of US$ 100,000 from India to the US. Over the years, the total
implicit subsidy from India
to the US
could be estimated to be of the order of hundred billion dollars.
The Impact of brain drain is, indeed, economically alarming as it affects
all sectors.
Readers can send their feedback at devajitmahanta@gmail.com
|
<>
No comments:
Post a Comment