Print

Mail

wiki links

Indians living overseas being asked to return to the homeland

"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 (鄧小平) put Marxist doctrine to one side and began wooing them a generation ago.

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.
This story has been viewed 3736 times.