I am well aware of the so-called “brain drain” situation in the country but what I didn’t know was, this phenomenon had been researched as far back as in 1974. What this amounts to is, brain drain had started at least a decade or two before which pushes the timeline to somewhere between 1950 and 1960. Those were the times when basic education was available only for certain classes of people. Completing high school used to be enough to get government jobs and as teachers. Formal education was not a requirement for earning a living and most people survived and prospered through their natural talents and hard work. My grandfather had studied only till high school but was a tremendously talented oil and canvas painter which was enough to land him a job at Dunlop under an English boss before Independence. Dunlop had even offered him an opportunity to work from their office in London in 1972 for 2 years which could have been extended. So in the light of Jagdish Bhagwati’s research, it would be highly improper to link formal education alone to brain drain.
From the time of Renaissance in Europe in the 16th century, the perception of magic and occult had started moving towards science and research. We know the story of Ramanujan and how he was invited to the UK to present his pioneering work in mathematics and was given the opportunity to further develop his work. The US, Great Britain and Germany had peaked on scientific research in the years between the two World Wars and had welcomed talented people into their countries from all over the world. Einstein did not run from Hitler and fade away. He found refuge in the US and also the scientific environment to do his research and bring out his best work. Imagine if he had not been able to find refuge anywhere else and was forced to accept Nazi diktat, the world would have had been a very different place now.
What has primarily aided the migration of people from India is the history of colonial rule and English education system because of which India has become a favoured destination for outsourcing of jobs. Add to this the explosive growth in science and technology especially after the advent of the internet. The corporate sector has grown so huge that information technology which is just meant to be a business enabler has become an industry sector in itself. This has given rise to a myriad of learning and employment opportunities. The developed western countries have been at the forefront of all of this and with a good reason. Their academic and social culture does not put all the onus on formal education. For free-thinking, people’s minds and thought process should not be inhibited in any manner. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg all became who they are not because of their college degrees.
From Gurukul model of education where people learned about the world and life in society by having classes under trees in nature, Indians have traversed a long way towards their present fixation for formal education. College degrees are the only way Indians see now to find good employment opportunities, wealth, prosperity, extravagant life in urban cities all of which leads to marriage and so on in an endless list. This wave has even led to traditional farmers giving up their occupation for education and life in cities. But what we are not realizing is that this mad rush formal education is restricting the free growth and expansion of our minds resulting in very narrow development of skills only fit for our professional lives in the corporate world and devoid of artistic and real-life skills.
All of these have resulted in an explosion in the academic sector in India. The impact of the IT industry on the Indian job sector gave rise to huge demand for engineering graduates because of the preference of 4-year degree holders for US work permits (H1B). In spite of having premier institutions like IITs, NITs (erstwhile RECs) and government engineering colleges, the madness to create more engineering graduates resulted in the setting up of countless private engineering colleges and creation of an unprecedented supply of engineers without similar rise in demand in the job sector.
So why the term brain drain? Erudite people have always been travellers and writers for thousands of years. Education may be activating the ancestral genes in us to travel and explore the world. But there are other reasons as well and prominent among them in recent times have been economic and lifestyle-related ones. One is the lure of earning in currencies of higher value compared to that of Indian Rupee in the developed countries which could result in higher savings in India. But this thought process is not Indian at all. Outsourcing of work from developed western countries to developing and underdeveloped countries was born from the strategy of finding cheap labour in countries whose currency value is much less than those of their own countries. Equally important is lifestyle as well. Steady economy, very less inflation, no to small price rise, social security, medical insurance are all factors that entice Indians to migrate because all these factors create a sense of prosperity and growth in life which translates to better status in society, especially back in India in their hometowns and among their family, friends and ex-colleagues.
Now about the Brain Drain Cess. So the proposal is to tax NRIs for working and living abroad. They are already paying taxes where they are working. Income tax percentages vary between 25-40% depending on the place in the US. Salaries in cities like New York are comparatively higher than others but so are expenses and income tax is 40%. So if the Indian government were to tax an NRI working in New York at say 30%, he/she would be effectively paying 70% tax on his/her income.
So dear MP, by introducing the Brain Drain Cess, you are in a way trying to put the blame on the NRI working class abroad for the brain drain when its root causes lie somewhere else. India has an academic structure which is churning out more graduates than it can employ. In spite of having a system where engineering and medical students have to go through the grind of entrance exams to get admission, successive state and central governments have allowed a parallel system of private colleges to flourish by the 1000s across the country where students who do not qualify through the entrance exams can still pay exorbitant amounts of fee and study the same courses. When students have to pay such high fees in these colleges, what the college management must have paid the government officials to get the approval to start the colleges becomes all too obvious. Having to spend so much money results in students becoming less skilled and more money oriented professionals. So introducing money and corruption into the world of academics has in a way resulted in the increase in the number of professionals moving abroad for work.
Corruption plays the most vital role in causing the brain drain. In the developed countries to where emigration of Indians happen, 80% of tax money is utilized for development, maintenance and administration. But in India, the situation is just the reverse. 80% tax money goes into the black hole of corruption and black money from where nothing comes back. Benefits of the rest 20% get distributed among the entire population and India has the 2nd largest population in the world. So we have Ambani’s Antilla at one end of the spectrum and farmers committing suicide in poverty at the other end. Everyone is perpetually chasing the elusive angel of prosperity. Anyone moving out of this chaos given an opportunity cannot be blamed. This is why NRIs counter brain drains with “It’s better to be brain drain than brain in the drain”. The difference is in just one word: accountability or lack of it in India.
So, if this cess is introduced, what do the NRIs get in return? In the countries, they are working they get social security benefits in return for paying taxes. In India, there is no such thing. People in India have to pay their bills, take care of their family and parents, pay for school fees of children, pay for insurance, medical bills and all other expenses and pay taxes on top of this with their salary. Two people earning in a nuclear family is also not enough these days. Tax paying working class is getting zero benefits from paying taxes. Nothing significant has been achieved after introducing the Swachh Bharat cess and we continue to pay it nevertheless. A large population of the so-called NRIs are the blue collared semi-skilled workers struggling in the Middle East. Making them also liable to pay the cess is beyond inhuman. Declaring this cess would also require the NRIs to reveal their entire income to the Indian government and one cess would lead to another thereby burdening them with more taxes in India with time.
Rather than a cess, what I would suggest is for the government to take steps to build confidence among the NRI diaspora to invest their hard earned money in India. There are also many cases where people move abroad for work and stop financial support for their families and even stop paying loans they have taken thereby putting into misery the lives of their parents and families. The government should open a complaint cell to hear such grievances and take appropriate action against such people. The objective should be to ensure that a part of the earnings of the NRIs keeps flowing to India. After the disaster that demonetization has brought upon the country’s economy and the rise in inflation and unemployment from 2016, the finger of blame points to misgovernance or even lack of governance. Forcing a cess upon NRIs would only add to the perception of the ineptness of the government and will not go down well with them.