Indian research and brain drain
Written by Vipul // August 20, 2010 // Science & Technology // 26 Comments
In this blog post, I consider the question: Why do many of the best Indian researchers (in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities) generally leave India, often for the United States and the United Kingdom? I consider three (interrelated) broad classes of explanations:
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Better pay and material conditions and better general environment
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More rewarding and productive environment for research, teaching, and exchange of ideas
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Less ideological and bureaucratic frustration
Many of these same considerations probably apply to high-end programming and information technology jobs as well as research and development jobs in other industries, though I will stick to research in my discussion and example.
In this post, I will not get into the question of the pros and cons of this brain drain, in so far as it exists.
Pay and material conditions
Average PPP-adjusted per capita incomes in the United States are about 16 times those in India. The pays of researchers are similarly substantially more than in India, though the proportional difference may not be as much (see a discussion here). Not only the pay, but also the availability of a number of resources is an inducement to move to the United States or United Kingdom (or Canada, Australia, or continental Europe) if one can manage it. The surrounding environment is cleaner (generally) and more advanced medical facilities are available.
I don’t have a lot to say about pay differentials, except that it should not be especially important for research. Pay differentials are high in research, but the construction worker salary in the United States has an even more skewed proportion. Also, pay differentials are more a consequence of India’s general poverty (and possibly of the government running of universities) and the main way out of them seems to be general economic growth (and perhaps a liberalisation that allows more private universities including foreign universities to set up in India).
Better research environment
Workers in the same job can complement each other as well as substitute for each other. In the complementary story, each new worker increases the productivity and value of existing workers. In the substitution story, each new worker reduces the marginal value of existing workers by making the existing worker’s skills and abilities less unique and less in demand. In other words, in some areas of work, workers impose positive externalities on each other (the complementary story) while in other areas of work, workers impose negative externalities on each other. Worker complementarity, as well as other kinds of complementarities, are cited as reasons, why a lot of industries in the same area set shop close to each other, rather than being distributed across larger geographic regions — Silicon Valley (software, Internet enterprises), Hollywood (US movie industry), Bollywood (Indian Hindi movie industry in Mumbai), are just some examples of geographical concentration of an industry. (For more technical background, see this).
With research (and more generally, with a lot of knowledge work), I suspect that the complementarity story strongly outweighs the substitution story. The presence of other researchers in an area greatly increases the productivity of a researcher. This is because an individual researcher in a small sub-discipline of a discipline can be saved from the burden of rediscovering related material in neighbouring sub-disciplines and concentrate on adding something genuinely new. More people in a research area can also lead to greater and more effective critiquing and checking of existing research ideas, reducing the half-life of wrong ideas. “Lone genius” myths notwithstanding, research is fundamentally an enterprise relying heavily on collaboration, hence phrases such as standing on the shoulders of giants and admonitions to avoid reinventing the wheel.
In so far as there are very few Indian researchers in an area, and there is very little productive engagement between these researchers, a new up-and-coming researcher has all the more incentive to leave India. Thus, the complementary nature of research leads to a self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating cycle, at least in this simple model.
The coming of the Internet has allowed researchers to collaborate across huge geographic distances. For instance, the mathematics Q&A site Math Overflow, intended for people to ask and answer research level mathematics questions, allows for communication across geographical lines (thus permitting a theoretical physics student in TIFR, India to enjoy a fruitful interaction with a mathematics undergraduate at MIT). The greater availability of preprints and online journals, some free and some with subscription fees, again allows people to benefit from the positive externalities while staying in India. Examples include ArXiV (for mathematics/physics/computer science) and PubMedCentral (for medical/biology stuff). The proliferation of online course materials such as MIT Open CourseWare — see also the OCW Consortium — allows people to learn stuff from some of the best teachers across the world.
However, it is worth remembering that the Internet helps everybody, and does not necessarily close the differential between being in India and being in a good research environment in the United States or United Kingdom. A contrary effect might also be operational — the Internet might increase people’s desire and ability to get into better research environments by serving as an advertisement for these better environments.
Ideological and bureaucratic frustration
This is least likely to occur in a subject such as mathematics, where truth is determined more objectively, despite what some caricatures might suggest. A distinction can be drawn between mathematics research (which rarely gets enmeshed in broader political disputes) and mathematics education, where interest groups ranging from Marxist social justice advocates to Vedic mathematics champions try to sneak their ideas into school curricula. But actual research in mathematics, since it has very little direct effect on hot button issues, is unlikely to succumb to ideological pressures. In addition, coming up with fake proofs of mathematical results for ideological purposes is generally harder than proving stuff for real.
However, ideological pressures could and do operate in the social sciences, particularly economics, history, and political science. These subjects claim to have something to say about public policy and the manner that social and economic interactions are organised — hence, the scope for ideological and vested interests to pay attention to these subjects is greater.
The story of trade economist and ardent free trader Jagdish Bhagwati (homepage, Wikipedia entry) is illustrative. Gurcharan Das describes what happened in his book India Unbound (pp. 162-163):
I sometimes wonder how we could have gone so wrong [on economic policy]when we had such brilliant economists. The Delhi School of Economics had acquired a formidable and well-deserved international reputation as a center of excellence. It had Jagdish Bhagwati doing seminal work on trade; A. L. Nagar was engaged in pathbreaking work in econometrics; [...] However, Professor Jagdish Bhagwati was the only Indian economist of note who tried to rouse Indians to the danger of Nehruvian socialism. His book (with [wife] Padma Desai) Indian Planning and Industrialisation was the first comprehensive study of the variety of ailments caused by our [India's] left turns of the 1950s and 1960s. As the intellectual climate worsened, rather than bang against the wall of intellectual intolerance erected by Indira Gandhi, Bhagwati left to teach first at MIT and then at Columbia University in New York.
In other words, Bhagwati’s views on free trade and market solutions to poverty did not sit well with the popular notions in the 1960s, particularly at a time when Indira Gandhi was in the ascendancy and shortly before her popular Garibi Hatao slogan was coined. Since he left India, Bhagwati has tirelessly advocated for free trade. He has written books such as In Defense of Globalization and given interviews such as this one.
It is unclear whether Bhagwati left India because his positions made life difficult for him personally or because of the frustration of no policy maker listening to those positions. In any event, there is an impression among many that Marxist perspectives enjoy a privileged position in the social sciences and people with free market liberal perspectives, or other perspectives that challenge Marxism, face an unfair and unpleasant battle. Scholars who do not conform to the Marxist mould are expected to fall in the “Hindutva” camp — the glorification of India’s Hindu heritage as a basis for what India should be as a nation today. Classical liberal perspectives (Wikipedia primer on classical liberalism) or their variants generally find a hard time surviving, and people holding such perspectives encounter overt and covert censorship — or perceive such. See, for instance, How Free Are We? by Jakob de Roover and The Absent Liberal by Ramachandra Guha in Outlook India. Here’s a review of Arun Shourie’s polemic against what he considers the rewriting of India’s history of Marxist historians and their poor intellectual credentials.
Unfortunately, brain drain is more harmful in the social sciences than in the sciences, so to the extent that the above ideological story plays out in reality, it hurts the future of social science knowledge. The reason is that social science knowledge, unlike science knowledge, is not so easily or readily universal — while the list of possible mechanisms underlying social phenomena may be universal, their relative proportions differ from place to place and time to time and culture to culture. Social science research relevant to India requires actual field work in India, whereas chemistry or mathematics research in France can be directly imported to India. This is not to say that the study of other places is irrelevant, but that it can go only so far. (See this on the difficulty of doing social science research).
Conclusion
In conclusion, all the three factors are probably operational, though ideological factors play a bigger role in the social sciences (and possibly humanities). In later posts, I will look at the pros and cons of research brain drain from different perspectives and further actions that may be suggested on account of this analysis.
26 Comments on "Indian research and brain drain"
This is a great piece and a lot of food for thought. Thanks for the perspectives shared.
I agree with you on most counts except:
Unfortunately, brain drain is more harmful in the social sciences than in the sciences, so to the extent that the above ideological story plays out in reality, it hurts the future of social science knowledge.
Yes, scientific developments are relatively more universal than others but the economic impact of generating that scientific knowledge in the country v/s importing it is as high as if not higher than the economic impact of bad economic policies. What do you think?
I would really interested in reading something that compares these two things.
Akshat,
Thanks for your comment. This issue is something I plan to address in a future post in more detail. Briefly, my thesis is this. There are two kinds of costs: (i) cost of developing knowledge, (ii) cost of acquiring knowledge developed elsewhere. My point was that for much of the social sciences, area-relevant social science requires that (i) be incurred within the country/region. There are plenty of universal social science findings too, but there is also a political issue that social science findings from other countries are typically not readily accepted because people in each country think they are more unique than they are.
With science, knowledge, whether developed in-house or acquired from elsewhere, doesn’t look all that different. Thus, the question boils down to how the costs of developing knowledge ((i)) compare to the costs of acquiring this knowledge from others ((ii)). As far as basic scientific knowledge (which is by and large readily accessible) is concerned, the cost (ii) could be considerably less, particularly in an era where transportation and communication costs are considerably less. When it comes to technologies that are patented or trade secrets, this doesn’t apply much. But the extra profits that accrue from patents usually accrue only to the specific individuals or companies that get those patents, not to the countries where they live at large.
As far as technological products are concerned, the places where the product R&D happens are not identical to the places where the final products first penetrate the market. Where the final products find a market is more a function of whether there are enough people with the willingness and the resources to try out the products. What I’ve just said is Amar Bhide’s “venturesome consumption” thesis — he argues that, for instance, the United States remains one of the most lucrative markets for new technological products because it has a large number of people eager to try out the latest products. There are other kinds of technological innovations that may find a bigger market in India.
As people in universities, we often hear rhetoric about how a university’s research helps its local community and country. This rhetoric is a useful tool in bagging more subsidies and grants. But let’s not believe it blindly.
I’d like to hear your thoughts, so I can address them in more detail subsequently when I blog on the issue.
I would also like to add another point (though it emanates from point 2 and 3): a general dissatisfaction with the educational system, stemming from lack of good-quality teachers and not-so-great peer group (most peers at MA/MPhil levels are disinterested in research, though this finding is based on a small sample).
actually ,there researchers will also get the encouragement & some good facilities about their research…
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