http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/international/asia/12INDI.html
India Harvests Fruits of a Diaspora By AMY WALDMAN
NEW DELHI, Jan. 11 — Sir Shridath Ramphal's grandmother left India in rebellion 150 years ago, after refusing to throw herself on her dead husband's funeral pyre. She ended up in indentured servitude in South America, in what was then the British colony of Guiana. When it became a nation, her grandson, Sir Shridath, became its first foreign minister.
Dipak C. Jain left India with optimism, heading for Dallas 20 years ago to work on a doctorate in applied mathematics. He became a professor in marketing, a field he had never heard of before leaving India, and then dean of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
This week both men returned to India as part of what was billed as the largest gathering of the Indian diaspora since independence in 1947. Like most of the nearly 2,000 "nonresident Indians" and "people of Indian origin" who made the journey from 63 countries, they were abundantly successful. Nonetheless, they represented very different strands of one of the world's largest and most productive diasporas.
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... According to a recent report by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, the 20 million Indians living abroad generate an annual income equal to 35 percent of India's gross domestic product.
Indians are the largest minority group in Britain and have the highest income among its minority groups. Indian-Americans have a median income 50 percent higher than the national average for the United States. Yet foreign direct investment by Indians abroad is only $1 billion, compared with about $60 billion invested by 55 million overseas Chinese. It is a gap the government hopes to close.
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Those attending the gathering included the prime minister of Mauritius and the former prime minister of Fiji, and two Nobel laureates — the economist Amartya Sen and the writer V. S. Naipaul. There were politicians, scholars, industrialists and jurists.
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Mr. Sen encouraged India to remember its long history of interaction with other civilizations and not to retreat into cultural isolationism. Mr. Naipaul — who with typically tart precision observed that the gathering "has the element of the trade fair" — told India to "stop blaming the British for everything."
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Jagadish Shukla, a professor of climate dynamics at George Mason University in Virginia, said he was starting a school in his village in eastern Uttar Pradesh. "In my village, nothing has changed," he said, noting that it took longer to get [to] the village from New Delhi than it did to get to New Delhi from the District of Columbia. [shades of Emipre?-pk]
"Why didn't I do this 25 years ago?" he said of the school. He speculated that much of the complaining about India at the gathering was motivated by guilt at having left India behind.