The Times of India
For IITians today, home is where the moolah is
Hemali Chhapia [ 5 Jan, 2007 0025hrs IST TIMES NEWS NETWORK ]
MUMBAI: 'One leg of an IITian is in India, the other in Air India' went a popular wisecrack of the late 1980s and early '90s. No longer. The brain drain from IITs has diminished to a trickle, with only 21 out of 3,980 BTech graduates going abroad in 2006.
About two decades ago, over 80% IITians hopped on to a plane for foreign shores, the preferred destination being the US. The 'IIT route' was a BTech from IIT, an MS (Masters) from USA and a dollar job. Much has changed since then, and brains that used to be siphoned off by developed nations are now preferring to stay back home.
In the early 1990s, the outflow of computer science graduates to the US was so high that the World Bank, in a report, had suggested that an exit tax be imposed on IITians and other professionals leaving the country — this, it said, could earn the government over $1 billion (about Rs 4,400 crore) per annum. Today, if the government decided to adopt this, it would earn only crumbs.
A quick look at statistics shows that in 2006, only three of IIT Kanpur's 273 BTech students and two from the five-year MSc integrated course went abroad. All the others — 267 MTech students, two-year MSc grads and MBAs — stayed back in the country. At IIT Delhi, of the approximate 1,000 job-seekers, only one student went abroad to join CapitalOne, a financial consulting firm.
The slowdown is evident even at the older IITs. At IIT Mumbai, 95% of the students were placed in India while at IIT Madras, only two BTech students went on to join Lehman Brothers at the Tokyo office.
"There was a time when I had to set aside days to write recommendation letters for students wanting to go abroad, either to study or work," says Ashok Misra, IIT-B director. ''Now, because good jobs are available to BTech students, not many opt for post-graduate courses abroad. Only about 15% students go overseas for higher studies and approximately 5% take a job outside India."
Ratnajit Bhattacharjee, faculty in-charge (training and placement) of IIT Guwahati, says corporate giants still opt for IITians but prefer to recruit them for their India operations. Bhattacharjee attributes the phenomenon of "almost zero brain drain" to the fact that MNCs have not just entered the country in a big way but are also looking at greater expansion here. "British Telecom used to regularly hire IIT Guwahati students,'' he says. ''It does today also, but for its Bangalore operations."
Deepak Phatak, former head of the computer science department at IIT Bombay, who conducted exit interviews with students from 1991 to 1994, remembers almost everyone then was flying to the US.
-- My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. - Jorge Louis Borges