Manu Joseph: Why nobody talks about India’s ‘brain drain’ anymore

Yet, we enthusiastically debated the issue. The debate wasn’t over whether brain drain existed, but whether the government should stop it. Now, for some reason, I don’t hear anyone use that expression, though occasionally people do mention that our “brightest" go to the US.

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The reason for its disappearance isn’t that society felt our feelings needed to be protected. I think what has happened is that nobody truly believes brain drain is real—or at least not in the way it was once imagined.

To most Indians, the brain is still an organ that is useful in cracking objective-type exams, or being good at any science. In that sense, the Indian brain has not expanded. It is just that the migration of ‘brains’ has not had any impact on India because there are so many brains.

We have easily filled the spaces that the so-called bright vacated by leaving India. Not just that. The kind of people who were once considered ‘brains’ turned out to be merely people who were lucky enough to be born in the right homes. Just look at what happened when opportunities seeped down the social pyramid.

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In fact, today, the children of the affluent who are inclined to “do science," or whose parents want them to do it, leave India because they can’t compete with other Indians for admissions to any of the most sought-after engineering colleges. The children of IITians, generally, have little chance of getting into the Indian Institutes of Technology. The upper class is unable to compete with equality.

In any case, the migration of thousands of scientific ‘brains’ has not been a drain. When the upper classes vacate their monopoly, others step in to fill the gap. The elite have been quitting not only India, but also entire fields like hardcore engineering. In a world where parents want to be nicer, children are drifting towards more enjoyable or fashionable fields, like rocketry. This gives other classes the chance to venture into what were once fiefdoms of the elite.

What drops in this process is the field’s prestige. The urban upper crust does something and insists that others regard it as “brainy" and lucrative. Others imitate them, slog for years, and achieve the capacity to do that “brainy" thing. But they realize the rewards are not the same for them. Once the elite vacates something, those spheres lose their allure. (This happened to the civil services and railway bureaucracy, too.)

Older IITians now say that the current profile of the Indian engineer student is appalling. Older bureaucrats say the same of the civil services. Because now they seem to see the ‘brain’ as not just an organ that cracks an entrance exam, but as something that produces a “rounded personality," by which they often mean quizzing and playing Carnatic music. That is what the IITians of my generation did.

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There is a view in India that we have millions of science and engineering degree-holders but very few talented people. And that those with any talent leave the country. The idea that the migration of people who are very good in science has reduced the quality of Indian intellectual life is an opinion that many people still hold. Yet, it is not a ‘brain drain’ because few truly believe that those people could have done much here.

Many years ago, a chief guest at a convocation ceremony at IIT Madras said, “Brain drain is better than brain in the drain." I don’t know if it was his original joke, but what I know is that all of Madras got to know within hours, and how we all laughed. Some of them who laughed are American citizens now and they do not laugh anymore at India jokes. Now, no chief guest would crack such a joke, but that is not because India has become a cradle of scientific innovation.

For a scientific genius to have an impact, he or she needs the right environment, which is best created by a combination of a government that knows what it is doing and capitalistic greed. American tech is largely the creation of the US government. That is why it is laughable that tech ‘bros’ keep talking about “small government." Their own fortunes have been driven by government policy to a large extent.

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There is, however, such a thing as a brain drain in one respect. It is not really about the migration of some people from India to the West. It is a drain within the sciences. Whatever gets hyped attracts the cream of scientific talent for years. And it also diverts the attention of enterprise, and even the government.

Take the current hysteria around artificial intelligence, for instance. It holds some promise of public benefits in the vague distant future, but if the past is any indicator, millions of ‘brains’ would have worked for billions of hours to create a whole new array of frivolous things. And at the expense of scientific fields that are left reeling in neglect.

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Just as the arts probably lost its best to the sciences, many sciences are losing talent to narrower domains of tech. Science, today, survives on hype. Modern medicine has been stuck for ages. It is not as transformative as it appears, especially if you are a healthy person. And, compared to a hundred years ago, we have not expanded our understanding of much.

We still have no clue what gravity is at a fundamental level. And we travel by air at the same speed as our grandparents. That is brain drain.

The author is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’.