Time to bloom Thousand Talents

India’s new draft 2019 education policy document is getting attention due to its purported Hindi imposition stance. But it lacks inspiration on another important count, pertaining particularly to higher education.

That relates to its inability to provide anything in terms of attracting Indian diaspora and its respected human capital from all around the world, back to India.

This is especially in a world where immigration is tightening in many countries globally, including in the US, and many graduate students, post-graduates, post-doctoral scholars, even faculty members on the tenure track or tenured, are pondering a return to their homeland.

Could this be pointing to a lack of will, foresight, and wisdom on behalf of governments in India over the years? One never knows.

However, we have examples from our neighbours to learn from. China’s 2008 initiated Thousand Talent Plan has started yielding benefits for the country’s global scientific and technological aspirations circa 2018-19, and is now much discussed in the international media.

Why is it difficult for India to initiate a Thousand Talent Plan like China? The answer may lie in immigration economics and research by scholars like Francesco Lissoni and co-authors who study return migration among Indian inventors and show that for education migrants, the return risk correlates negatively with the education level they attain.

Essentially, that means, while predicated by entry cohort, the higher the education acquired for Indians who have left India, the less likely it is for them to return, a result we all know anecdotally, but for which we appreciate less the reasons behind the same.

The new draft education policy provides some pointers though. First, it shows a lack of structural thinking in incentivising returnees like China. Returnee higher education professionals, as China has shown with its C9 League elite universities like Tsinghua, Peking or Fudan, require three essential things to return to their home country.

First, a comfortable baseline salary to fend for the family that takes care of what is no longer an advantage in the East of purchasing power parity. Sending a single 5-7-year-old child to a good private school in Indian cities today (public school system, we know is regrettably broken) requires something like $7,000 a year with regional heterogeneity here in this number.

How are even the Seventh Pay Commission salaries going to support this for a family with two kids and let’s assume a single income parent, is worth pondering?

This is also when even in an institute of national excellence, like IIT Mumbai, one saw in October 2018, a sudden non-payment of faculty salaries.

A second issue one can learn from China is India’s inability to create a Shenzhen or Shanghai like ecosystem. The future of work tomorrow, as many have started highlighting, is inter-disciplinary conversations between industry, science, technology, law and the liberal arts.

Leaving a couple of new age universities like Ashoka standing and trying in their own islands, Indian universities, unfortunately, are not going anywhere in nurturing or fostering an interdisciplinary curriculum or mindset with its decadent curriculums and incumbent faculty collegium.

That will require nourishing the liberal arts as much as the hard and soft sciences under the same university umbrella. Yes, the liberal arts folks can be pesky, but they are required; let’s ask the new finance and external affairs minister of the current government of India, both alumnus of JNU, India’s controversial hotbed of liberal arts thinking and education.

Absent ecosystems even in cities like Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune or Ahmedabad (with some histories of ecosystems, albeit more or less incommunicado with each other), the future of Indian higher education looks bleak and uninspiring to attract the sharpest of global Indian diaspora minds as full-time faculty members.

A third issue relates to leadership. Leaving an exception here or there, leadership at Indian universities, elite or otherwise, are nothing stimulating to write home about.

Nor are they given long and broad enough ropes when they try to usher in change. The end result remains a general environment of malaise and ennui. Consider instead the example of Subra Suresh, who is now the President of a Nanyang Technological University. Suresh is known for his work as a former president of Carnegie Mellon University, a former Dean of Engineering at MIT and also as a former Director of the National Science Foundation in the US. Yes NTU is in Singapore and not in China, but the basic message remains. While the rest of the East is rising, India is sadly fading away in its ability to inspire and attract excellence in university leadership and spur up its higher education.

Overall, the situation with IEL (incentives, ecosystem, and leadership) is so unfortunate that Indians are now returning to the East, but many more to Chinese, Singaporean, Hong Kong and Japanese universities, than to their homelands.

Clearly, this is a missed opportunity. Getting Singaporean permanent residency is becoming increasingly difficult and a situation like that may soon arise in China, Hong Kong or Japan. In that world, what is preventing the Indian government from starting its own Thousand Talents Plan to attract education migrants?

Maybe the answer is not money, foresight or wisdom, but a structural intent to keep the universities away from the scientific frontier.

After all, to stimulate education, the social planner also requires the gumption to accept curiosity, creativity, science, evidence and hard questions that will come with it.

Author is from IIM-A and Hoover Institution