India could curb brain drain the Chinese way

MUMBAI: Lose the East and—to borrow an idea from a Rushdie novel—you lose your bearings and the raison d’etre of your life. That, however, is definitely not the case for many Indian and Chinese scientists who go West for training and seldom return. The US National Science Foundation estimates that less than ten per cent of Indian and Chinese students who enrol in scientific and technical graduate programmes in the US return to work in their home countries.
Intent on plugging this brain drain, China has introduced a slew of programmes in recent years to lure back top scientific talent.For instance, Beijing has shortlisted a handful of expatriates who are leaders in genomics and bio-informatics. The high-fliers currently walk the halls of Harvard, Princeton and the like, but Beijing hopes to bring them back to China with leadership positions, plum salaries and free apartments. The strategy is not dissimilar to that of top American universities —if you want a star professor who you believe can push the limits of a field, you up the stakes until you get her.
The question is, should India be learning a trick or two from its neighbour? Few Indian scientists seem comfortable with replicating the same strategy in India. “Singling out specific individuals and giving them ‘super’ salaries, especially if those so rewarded are returnees from abroad, will create a caste system in the Indian scientific establishment,’’ warns Shiraz Minwalla, a professor of physics at Harvard. Holding degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and Princeton, Mr Minwalla is certain that he will return to India. But a ‘star package’ holds little appeal because he believes it would destroy the camaraderie so essential among scientific colleagues.
Other Chinese experiments to leverage expatriate talent seem more appealing. The Chinese Academy of Sciences is funding courses in biology for which it flies in guest lecturers from around the world. The academy hopes that this will bring home world-class graduate education and persuade more students to stay. “We learn of cutting-edge research and techniques, for which otherwise we would have had to go abroad,’’ says Rong Li, a second year student at Shanghai University, adding that the excitement conveyed by the expatriate professors is convincing her to remain in the field and in the country.
The budget of the programme barely covers the professors’ airfare. But Indian expatriates seem more than willing to participate in such shoestring ventures. Kamesh Munagala, who is doing a Ph.D at Stanford and whose claim to fame lies in having stood first in 1994’s IIT joint entrance examination, describes how he recently taught for free at the Indian Institute of Science while in Bangalore to work with a bio-informatics start-up. “And I would readily do it again,’’ he says. China has also wielded its vast network of expatriates to ramp up its basic research. Indeed, many observers attribute the dramatic increase in the scale and quality of China’s basic research in certain fields to formal and informal collaborations with expatriate scientists.
“The desi networks are also strong but still, you don’t see too many directlab-tolab collaborations between expats and domestic scientists,’’ muses Nirja Patel about the Indian scene. A recent Ph.D from Cornell, who is surveying the job market in India, Ms Patel adds that the networks nonetheless help in integrating Indian scientists into the world community.
“Expatriates help Indian labs obtain new equipment and chemicals, assist in getting good Indian students admitted to American faculties, and invite their Indian peers to international conferences,’’ she says. Guest lectures and invitations to international conferences don’t, however, really compensate for the social and economic costs that both India and China incur when they lose their cream—especially because these outstanding individuals have gained from the countries’ highly subsidised education systems.
A UNDP report, which tried to put numbers to the immediate economic loss, estimated that India loses more than $2 billion annually due to the exit of its computer professionals to the United States. To recoup some of these losses, the report suggested that India issue a flat ‘exit tax’ to the tune of $10,000.
It also recommended a Singapore-style loan system where each student in tertiary education is given a study subsidy by the government which must be repaid if the student leaves the country. “But the best way to get the scientists and engineers to return is by showing them that they can be equally productive and successful in India,’’ says Shubha Tole, a Xavierite who joined Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Fundamental Research after a Ph.D at Caltech and a post-doc at the University of Chicago.
Realising this, China has dramatically increased its budget for science to create new institutes and better infrastructure. This, Ms Tole notes, is a far more powerful magnet than star salaries and exit taxes. “My students are most likely to return,’’ she says, “if I show them that I can publish with the same intensity and quality as I would have at Caltech or Chicago.’’