Sanjaya Baru, an Indian author and journalist, believes Indians are too sanguine about a sustained brain drain from their country. In a new book, “Secession of the Successful,” he points out that nearly 1.9 million Indians renounced their citizenship between 2011 and 2023. That’s a small fraction of India’s 1.45 billion people, but it includes some of the country’s most talented engineers, doctors and scientists.
Since independence in 1947, no Indian working in India has won a Nobel Prize in science or a Fields medal, the equivalent in mathematics. The last Indian in India to win a Nobel Prize for science was the physicist C.V. Raman in 1930. A 2023 National Bureau of Economic Research paper found that of the top 1,000 students who cleared the grueling nationwide entrance exam for the Indian Institutes of Technology in 2010, 36% had migrated eight years later, mostly to the U.S. At the very top—the top 10 students to clear the exam that year—the migration rate was 90%.
“It’s not accurate to look at this as a pinprick on an elephant,” Mr. Baru says in a phone interview from Hyderabad. “Why has no Indian government been able to get some of the top guns to come back?”
Why do so many Indians leave and so few go back? Economic opportunity plays a big part. In purchasing power parity terms, which takes into account the lower cost of most goods and services in poor countries, India’s gross domestic product per capita of $11,000 is roughly an eighth of America’s $86,000.
But it isn’t only about money. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, an Indian-born scientist who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2009, has pointed out that a lack of infrastructure, excessive bureaucratic and political interference, and overly complex rules make it hard for India to attract scientific talent. India spends only 0.6% to 0.7% of its GDP on research, a far smaller fraction than the U.S. or China.
Urban squalor is another problem. The flashy Delhi suburb of Gurugram (formerly Gurgaon) pays a large chunk of the state of Haryana’s taxes. But due to a lack of urban planning, and a political class beholden to voters in the countryside, Gurugram lacks a proper drainage system. Videos of luxury cars in Gurugram drowning in murky brown rainwater are a staple of Indian social media. The richest neighborhoods of Bangalore feature garbage rotting on the streets. Delhi has some of the most expensive real estate in Asia and some of the least breathable air in the world.
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