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t was a strange coming-of-age moment. A few years ago, I discarded any notion of being a whiz with numbers and SAT across the table with a financial planner. What were my family's goals, I was asked. Well, I hummed, you know, a larger car and a trip abroad every couple of years. No, that's not good enough, I was told. Later, my wife came up with an alternative 'goal': since we barely got into decent colleges 20 years ago, how about working towards sending our two boys abroad for undergraduate studies? When I presented that to the planner, his eyes lit up. "Now that's a long-term goal."There, I've said it. I am (if only in a manner of aspiration) a part of the growing tribe of middle- and upper-middle class Indians who are using education as a vehicle to march away from India. Education has become the first sign of secession. From the gnawing desperation to get children admitted into the right "public" schools and the ease with which terms like "International Baccalaureate" now roll off the tongue to the relentless wooing of students in international education fairs and the boom in coaching institutes that "prepare" students to take the SAT or GRE, the bubble is complete. If you have the will (and the means), there's a gilded exit ramp to eject out of the country.
It is no longer "need" that pushes students to go abroad for higher education—fattened by the fruits of liberalisation, the new mantra for the middle class is "can do, will do". A small segment of students are now even going abroad at the senior secondary school level. Then, of course, many more students are paying their way to do undergraduate courses abroad. Manju Bharat Ram, the chairperson of Delhi's Shri Ram School, says 35 per cent of the latest school-leaving batch of 180 students ended up going abroad. That doesn't include another 35 students in the IB programme, most of whom went abroad. "There are just not enough quality schools and colleges in India. There is hurt among people, who then look to the menu available abroad," says she. And further up the chain, a higher number of students from smaller colleges are joining the bandwagon.
All told, there are anywhere between 1,00,000 and 1,60,000 students who expend about $4 billion in forex to go abroad every year. But what begins as mental secession ends up as physical migration. That's how it's always been, says Santosh Desai of the Future Group, who points out the Indian view on higher education is almost adversarial: "Education is a transportation device and not a learning device. The clear motivation is that it is located internationally," he adds.
Till the 1960s, going out for studies was seen as a "rite of passage" for a small upper middle class elite. An eventual return was written into the script. What changed things was the emergence of the US as an educational power in the 1970s, and its hunger for trained manpower. This fuelled an exodus from the IITs and medical schools over the next couple of decades, a "brain drain" that has only somewhat abated thanks to India's recent economic ascendancy. By the 1990s, typically, it was an established exit route.
A cross-section of my contemporaries who went abroad in the early 1990s agree that their decision was a function of better "prospects"; to "break free" from what was seen as a "stultifying social and economic landscape". Of course, most did not get into the top institutions of higher learning here, and migration presented the opportunity of a new, more prosperous life. In that sense, feels P.V. Indiresan, former director of IIT Madras, "the most ambitious people are going abroad, and not necessarily the best."
With the swelling numbers has come a decline. "As a professor in the US, in a second-tier institution, I can state quite clearly that the quality of students coming from India for graduate studies is lower over the past decade," says microbiologist Dr Anthony Sinai from the University of Kentucky College of Medicine. Perhaps, that's inevitable when the power of the purse takes over. But the fact remains that the educated elite in a country of 1.1 billion is choosing to leave.
Worse, they have no real stake in the system they are leaving behind—all that remains is a sense of victimisation and "rage". This ends up creating distortions—look at the media, which gives an inordinately huge amount of mind space to the IIMs and IITs, and other premium institutes of higher learning. Or reservations: the sense of scarcity is built up to paint the picture of a "victim", ironical for a very small and wealthy elite. It also breeds hypocrisy: the very bureaucrats, politicians, movers and shakers who are trying to right the education system are an integral part of the secession club. "The most dangerous bit about the secession is that this segment thinks it represents the mainland," says Desai.
There can, of course, be a strong defence of the migratory Indian: It's a global world, and Indians are global people who flow all over in search of options, driven by the self-belief that they are as good as anybody else. Why, then, can't Indians be seen as legitimate global citizens? Moreover, Indians have always spread their wings. And now, thanks to India's economic rise, proponents of this view point to the growing number of NRIs returning home to take up jobs, a sort of reverse brain drain.
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ure, many people are coming back due to increasing economic uncertainty in the West. However, most returnees end up working for the Indian arms of MNCs—or are at the top of their game and can earn more outside the West. And then, there are some who have no choice at all. In any case, most people returning to India have an option to exit again, thanks to green cards and dual citizenships. There is a "social need" that has been tagged on to return, and this "context to have a fulfilled life" is certainly an influencing factor in many (but not all) cases. "If salaries were halved, a lot of them would go back (to the West)," says Shaleen Bhabu, a senior manager at Cadence Design who returned to India after two decades in the US.The Indian State has a "laissez faire" approach to Indians going abroad for higher education. While there continues to be periodic demand for an "exit tax" on those leaving premium state-run institutes like the IIMs, there are many doubters. The larger issue—and debate—is how to increase the number of quality institutes to stem the outflow.
One way is by allowing foreign universities into India by pushing through the Foreign Education Providers (Regulation) Bill. Premier global universities are keen to enter this lucrative market for higher education—the problem is that many dubious institutes will slip in too. "It's a good thing, provided you can ensure quality," says N.C. Saxena, former member, Planning Commission. But will the international universities want to cut off their oxygen? Will the outposts match up to the standards of the parent unit?
Unfortunately, the government's recipe is focused on quantity—and not quality. Announcing new IITs, IIMs and model schools is all very fine, but where are the qualified people to run them? A recent report from the Kauffman Foundation says Indian IT firms are successfully working around the "quality" of engineering graduates coming out of India by investing in in-house training and development. That's instructive because it shows we're good at "adjusting" to harsh realities. Or we just end up leaving. There has to be a better way.