Tuesday, February 02, 2016

Why do Indians change when they go to the US?

When we read articles praising Indians we feel a warm glow of satisfaction. Trouble is that these are not really Indians, but Persons of Indian Origin, who are now citizens of the US. There was Rajeev Motwani who helped in developing the algorithm which started Google, which is now headed by CEO, Sundar Pichai. There is Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Nikesh Arora at Softbank, Shantanu Narayen at Adobe, Francisco D'Souza at Cognizant, Ajay Banga at Mastercard, Indra Nooyi at Pepsi and so on. Indians make up just 6% of the Silicon Valley workforce but 15% of Startups. Average income for Indian households is $86,135 per year, as opposed to $51,914 for all Americans. Indians are not just management types who head large multinationals. There are many famous in research. There is Rakesh Jain in tumor biology, Rangaswamy Srinivasan in ablative photo decomposition, Praveen Chaudhuri in materials science and B Jayant Baliga in insulated gate bipolar transistor, among many others, whose work is earning billions of dollars in industry. So why do Indians excel in the US and not at home? Part of the reason is our humongous population of 1.3 billion fighting among each other for a larger slice of fixed resources. The US is 4 times the size of India with 300 million people. The main reason is politics. Socialism in written in our constitution, which means you win elections by turning out vast multitudes of illiterate graduates by saving on quality. A panel has recommended that fees at IITs should be increased by 200% to Rs 300,000 a year. The thinking is that since Sundar Pichai, CEO at Google, qualified from IIT Kharagpur then all graduates will go on to earn millions of dollars, so they should study on loan. The majority of Indians do not earn Rs 300,000 a year and so will not be able to find guarantors for the loans and what if a student is unable to work full time through illness after qualification. How will he repay the loan? The IITs are starved of funds because government funds are used up in getting millions into schools and colleges, to prevent social unrest, even if they learn nothing. The government is left with no money to fund research. US universities have billions of dollars in endowments and university research departments tie up with companies so that there is constant innovation. Since graduates from IITs are doing so well they should have no problems in collecting donations from alumni. That is where politicians are a millstone around education. A former minister wanted all donations to go through his ministry. The same minister recently said that IITs produce scholars only for foreign countries. He does not even understand the damage he has inflicted. Since there is no quality companies do not take risks in India as they do in the US. So no progress. We will have to be satisfied with reading about Indians abroad.

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