There’s undoubtedly something rotten in the state of India. The recent appointment of Parag Agrawal, an alumnus of IIT-Bombay as the US-based chief executive of Twitter Inc, USA and successor of Jack Dorsey, the promoter-chairman of this multi-billion dollar hi-tech social network corporation, is being hailed as a great triumph of India and IIT-B in particular. Normatively this would be cause for dismay, if not lamentation. Instead, following Agrawal’s great vault into the highest seat of power in Twitter, Indian media has gone to town highlighting the remarkable reality that CEOs of several of the world’s largest, wealthiest and most powerful corporations, including Microsoft, Google, IBM among others are professionals of Indian origin who have received (English medium) school and undergraduate education in this country.
With its massive 1.30 billion consumers, contemporary India is the world’s largest market for goods and services. Therefore, the prospects of graduates of IITs, IIMs and other top-ranked institutions carving out great careers and establishing successful multi-billion dollar corporations should be better in India than in unfamiliar foreign environments.
Yet according to a recent research study, despite sky-high tuition fees and Covid-prompted travel hassles, the number of Indian school and college leavers heading for American and foreign universities has doubled in 2021-22. It’s a safe bet that more than half won’t return after graduation.
And it’s not only millions of youth and young professionals who are fleeing India. According to a Morgan Stanley study, 23,000 high net worth individuals (HNIs) i.e, wealthy citizens who had established successful business enterprises emigrated from India between 2014-2019. West Bengal finance minister Amit Mitra places the number higher at 35,000. The question needs to be posed: why would wealthy citizens with prosperous business enterprises and reputation voluntarily leave home and hearth, friends and relatives to live in foreign lands to suffer tolerance and condescension, if not outright racial prejudice? They wouldn’t unless living and work conditions are really bad in their homeland.
There’s the rub. The plain truth is that 70 years of inorganic socialism has eroded all social respect for wealth creating entrepreneurs and businessmen. It has become standard practice for post-independence India’s flourishing neta-babu brotherhood egged on by feckless Left academics and the commentariat to rubbish wealth creators in industry and business. Tata-Birla who were projected as exploiters instead of enablers of the economy in the 1970s have been replaced by Ambani-Adani as villains, despite their paying the equivalent of 7-8 percent of GDP into the public exchequer by way of taxes and generating massive well-paid employment.
Therefore instead of celebrating the success of Indian emigrants abroad, there’s urgent need to create living and working conditions for them to succeed in their own country.
