As the annual ritual of the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD) concludes, the Indian government’s approach to cultivating overseas Indians needs critical scrutiny. The fact that governments in India — both at the national and state levels — have been making much greater efforts to cultivate overseas Indians is not in doubt. Examples range from a dedicated ministry of overseas Indian affairs (MOIA) to address issues specific to the country’s large diaspora to policy initiatives like the Overseas Citizen of India, insurance schemes for workers going overseas (the Pravasi Bharatiya Bima Yojana), and efforts to address the predicament of deserted Indian women. Not to mention the scores of trips made by chief ministers to engage the diaspora from their states.
These are all laudable initiatives. Nonetheless, are they largely symbolic? Take the case of education. Although India has hemorrhaged talent overseas (the ‘brain drain’) since the mid-1960s, there is broad recognition that the human and financial capital of overseas Indians can be a tremendous asset for the country, especially given the tremendous challenges facing Indian higher education. How well do the initiatives of the Indian government address this important issue?
The most obvious channel to tap overseas Indians is alumni contributions to their alma mater. There have been some contributions, notably in the case of IITs. However, even as this effort was gathering pace, the Indian government’s human resource development ministry formed the Bharat Shiksha Kosh (India Education Fund) in 2003. By centralizing all overseas donations for education to the fund, the move effectively denied would-be donors any say in the purposes for which the money was used. Unsurprisingly, individual contributions to IITs dropped dramatically. While the current government reversed the decision, its populist stance on reservations at IITs and IIMs has meant that this government has simply moved from the frying pan to the fire.
In principle, India should have done much better in getting those who got a virtually free education to plough back money into their alma mater. Despite the hype, NRI contributions are modest compared to what the same alumni are giving overseas. Why? In part, we still do not have a well-established philanthropic culture. But more, as long as bureaucrats and ministers have a greater role in the governance of these institutions, alumni will simply stay away.
The lack of autonomy of educational institutions has been one of the biggest impediments in attracting diasporic philanthropy for higher education. Alumni who are prepared to give substantial resources also want to have a say in its use and an institutionalized mechanism to have their voice heard. However, the governance structures of most higher education institutions are so poor that such mechanisms are non-existent. Nearly half of the alumni of AIIMS are overseas but they have balked at contributing since they have little say in the governance of that organisation. The recent intrusiveness of the health ministry in that institution’s governance, exceptional even by Indian standards, has all but put paid to any possibility of alumni contributing to the institution.
A second way to tap overseas Indian talent for improving higher education in India is to leverage them for faculty, a strategy used by Korea and Taiwan earlier and aggressively pursued by China today. However, as per the revised Citizenship Act, “an overseas citizen of India shall not be entitled to the rights conferred on a citizen of India... for appointment to public services and posts in connection with the affairs of the Union or of any state except for appointment in such services and posts as the central government may by special order in that behalf specify.” Given faculty vacancy rates of between a quarter and a third in elite institutions and rampant mediocrity in most other Indian higher education institutions, one might have thought that the strategy would be more welcoming. But that would presume that there is a strategy.
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Prof. Devesh Kapur holds the Madan Lal Sobti Professorship for the Study of Contemporary India, and is the Director, Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania This article first appeared in The Indian Express newspaper.
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