"The whole world is looking at India with admiration and hope," said Atal Behari Vajpayee, India's prime minister, earlier this month. "Whenever I have interacted with members of the diaspora during my travels abroad, I have heard them say that there never was a better time to be an Indian and never a better time to be in India."
Up to a point. Despite the economic reforms piloted by Vajpayee's government since the early 1990s, India's expatriates have not been coming home, and neither has their money.
Financially, that represents a huge loss. More than 20 million Indians live overseas -- including 1.3 million in Britain and slightly more in the US. Their combined wealth has been estimated at pounds sterling 100 billion (US$7,859 billion) -- equal to a third of the billion-strong Indian nation's GDP. In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs of Indian origin are thought to account for 40 percent of all start-ups.
Small wonder Delhi should want to harness this phenomenal commercial success. Vajpayee was addressing the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, an annual conference designed to strengthen links between "non-resident Indians" (NRIs) and the motherland. He was joined by envoys from several regional governments, each keen to impress on rich NRIs the investment opportunities offered by their IT, energy, water and tourism industries.
Karan Bilimoria, founder of Cobra Beer and co-chairman of the Indo-British Partnership, a trade group supported by the British DTI, was encouraged by what he heard at the conference. "India has been opening up for investment -- in the past two years especially. And the country is embracing NRIs, viewing them not just as people who left, but as people whose experiences abroad can enrich India."
The blueprint for Delhi's charm offensive is China, where risky investment by overseas Chinese played a crucial role in sparking the economic boom. Pragmatic Deng Xiaoping (
In India, though, the NRI event is just two years old. Arvinder Singh, of Delhi's Center for the Study of Developing Societies, blames this on the resentment and jealousy expats face when they return. "Coming back home is much more complex for Indians than it is for Chinese. No one wants them back," he says. "If a millionaire from the US wanted to invest in the Punjab, he'd get chased out."
Speaking to NRI conference delegates at Delhi's InterContinental hotel, one repeatedly hears the plaintive observation that India has done little to court them till now. Many expats left with bad memories; many are from India's religious minorities. Even now, they complain, their country looks on them as little more than cash cows.
One thing is for certain: foreign direct investment into India is only a tenth of what China can boast. And while 50 percent of the money coming into China is from the Chinese diaspora, only 10 percent of inward investment in India comes from NRIs.
The factors holding investment back are deep-seated. NRIs complain about red tape, poor transport and infrastructure in India, being defrauded by Indian bureaucrats and being unable to expatriate their property in India because of foreign exchange controls. "The first thing is to create the perception that things work in India," says Dipak Jain, Indian-born head of the Kellogg School of Management in America. "A machinery has to be put in place for this, before anything else."
For all the glum talk, though, India's economy is growing at 8 percent a year and there are signs that many younger expats aren't waiting to get involved. NRIs are in the vanguard of India's burgeoning back-office industry, helping western corporations take advantage of India's low labor costs and outsource their accounting, payroll, or customer service operations to the subcontinent.
Moving call-center jobs from Hull to Haryana has been controversial in Britain, of course, but it represents just a small tributary in a flood of money pouring into India's knowledge-based sectors. More than 20,000 software workers have returned to India from the US alone in the past two years. Many have arrived on the coat-tails of Oracle, Texas or Intel, all of which have set up major facilities in Bangalore or Hyderabad. If enough follow, India's notorious "brain drain" may yet be reversed.
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers