The fortunes of the H-1B visa have alarmed India’s expatriate elite. It seems that current visa-holders are safe for now. Future applicants might face severe roadblocks.

Other countries are eyeing this talent pool. China is touting its K-visa. Germany, Britain, Canada and Japan have extended their welcomes. What can India do to bring this prized workforce back home?

The task may not be easy. After all, these people left the country by choice. No doubt their reasons were varyingly strong and varyingly reversible. Beyond all individual chemistries lurks a basic question: how can India create a professional ecosystem where émigrés can return, and future generations remain, with no sense of loss and possibly of gain?

One misconception can be summarily dismissed. The H-1B brigade is not driven by a craze for wealth and creature comforts. They may value those rewards, but they obtain them through intellectual pursuits. Success in such pursuits calls for deep mental commitment matched by ability. They gain both mental fulfilment and material reward as productive contributors to the knowledge economy.

In a knowledge economy, advanced learning, sustained by a culture of research, is dynamically harnessed to yield ever-new products and services for material profit. Information technology and pharmaceuticals are two ready examples. In this mental universe, the line between fundamental and applied knowledge is hard to draw. The application of acquired knowledge leads compellingly to new basic inquiries that might even stretch the bounds of the known. A knowledge economy must embrace this entire range of exercises.

Fundamental research seldom makes money directly. On the contrary, it can swallow up huge sums. It may lead nowhere, or to findings with no immediate financial gain. These risks are offset by the prospect of eventual profits massively beyond those of conventional manufacture and services, besides the power and stature such knowledge brings.

The US has provided the world with the all-time model of a knowledge economy. That model seems to be disintegrating with improbable speed. Can India provide something comparable to attract the displaced knowledge workers?

A knowledge economy relies on the conjunction of three spheres: education and research, industry and finance, and governance. In India, the relation between the first and the other two is uneven at best and commonly tenuous or absent, marred by distrust and incomprehension. The fruits of research are commonly confined to the page or screen, even where patents have been taken out. Industry deplores their irrelevance; academia alleges apathy on industry’s part.

Hence India’s higher education and research lack a participatory dimension, the sense of joining in a common endeavour across boundaries. Individual researchers pick their lonely paths through this bleak landscape. There is little sense of a broader ecosystem embracing even (or especially) one’s rivals and adversaries: there effectively is no ecosystem. The public universities are lapsing into irrelevance, the best of them struggling to hold their own against the few private ones committed to the liberal Humboldtian model of the modern Western campus. Most private universities offer far less: at best, competent training for a lucrative profession, and often not even that.

This is a disheartening milieu for academics. Returning expatriates would find poor soil for their aspirations. Both the State and the corporates are endemically parsimonious (as early reports of Anusandhan, the national research funding programme, indicate).
The State grows more and more crassly authoritarian, and there is little common cause among institutions.

This is the reverse of the now beleaguered American model; but we cannot glibly embrace that model. America has always relied heavily on the import of talent. That is unlikely to happen with India: it may be hard enough to bring our native talent home. In any case, no educational order can be geared to returning expatriates. They can only augment a system directed towards the talent at home.

The greater number of our brightest youth do not go abroad. But their potential is neither fully developed nor fully utilized owing to the systemic deficiencies of India’s academic and economic orders. Individuals end up demoralized, and the nation suffers an appalling waste of human resources.

Any planning must start by addressing this immeasurable fund of talent at home. It is galling that this self-evident truth should need saying. Quality education is increasingly confined to those who can bring along their own financial and intellectual capital — plainly put, the rich and the privileged. The bulk of our talent pool lies untapped. Our demographic dividend is turning into a crushing liability.

Expanding educational capacity through private institutions will only worsen the imbalance. To garner the talent of our entire population, from the heights of the knowledge economy through every rung of the manufacturing and service sectors, the Indian State and corporates must jointly undertake what they have always shirked: investing massively in an intensive education system for all our youth. America professed this goal in the misleadingly titled National Defense Education Act of 1958, ensuring the commanding position of US universities. China did so, more inclusively, through the State Education Commission set up in 1985, ensuring a full range of outcomes from product manufacture to cutting-edge research and development.

The Chinese model, like the American, is far from flawless. China’s low international profile in the humanities and social sciences, hence its limited soft power, cannot be explained solely by historical factors like late access to English: it is chiefly due to China’s authoritarian socio-political order. Sooner or later, this is bound to affect scientific and technological inquiry as well: mental space cannot be compartmentalized. Belying our own open and tolerant legacy, we have taken to the same illiberal path. It would be suicidal to go further.

The West is reneging on the liberal tradition that formed the cornerstone of its knowledge order. To provide an alternative home for that order, we must cultivate the free life of the mind. We cannot trust to shortcuts — nor to chance, waiting upon geopolitical accidents to bring our expatriate kinsfolk home. We who are at home must work the change for ourselves and for them.

Sukanta Chaudhuri is Professor Emeritus, Jadavpur University