Edits

Editorials

India Today
October 26,1998

Home and the World

India, Amartya and the great untapped NRI resource.

Edits For millions of Indians the spontaneous joy at Amartya Sen's Nobel Prize was tempered by the nagging questions about his passport. There was a sense of relief when it became clear that even after three decades in the West, Sen retains his Indian citizenship -- and this country can legally claim him as its own. Yet, notwithstanding the minor matter of Sen's nationality, it is worth wondering whether India has any moral right to share Sen's achievement. Indeed, this is as apt a moment as any for India to ask itself why it has become the world's best country to migrate from. At least Sen left India from a position of strength. Scientist Hargobind Khorana, later an American Nobel laureate, had a decision forced upon him: India could offer him nothing more than rejected job applications. From Jagdish Bhagwati and his free trade doctrines to Sen and his welfare theories, Indians, non-resident Indians (NRIs), are among the world's best economists; and India is among the world's worst economies. It is a paradox which would shame any race. Indians, ever ready to take the facile option, explain it away in terms of the "brain drain".

It would be easy to convert the aftermath of Sen's Nobel achievement into yet another turgid analysis of why Indians thrive abroad, why India's scientific and academic institutions foster bureaucracy rather than brilliance, why the business environment does anything but facilitate enterprise. This, really, is old hat. What is more important is the need to recognise that the NRI community is potentially India's largest resource base but it lies almost completely unharnessed. In the United States and parts of Europe, the Jewish diaspora is the most effective Israeli embassy. Overseas Chinese have made a considerable contribution to their mother country's coffers. India, however, chooses to remember the NRI only when he wins worldwide acclaim or when there is a pressing foreign exchange problem. In a sense, the man is less important than his dollars. Underpinning such behavioural patterns is the misplaced arrogance that somehow the NRI is a traitor, one who has fled the home country's choppy waters for a more comfortable cruise abroad. Only the most pigheaded will not see the difference between going where opportunity takes you and letting down your land. In the best traditions of industrial capitalism, the NRI is an economic free agent. He will go where the cost-benefit ratio is most favourable. He loves India but to seek to influence him on the basis of sheer sentiment is short-sighted and self-defeating. A lasting relationship can only be built on a mutually beneficial exchange -- of ideas as much as wealth.

Despite its relative affluence, the NRI community is better looked upon as a vast reservoir of human capital. With the exception of Rajiv Gandhi, no Indian prime minister has come even close to conceding this. Of all Indian political parties, the BJP carries the greatest goodwill among the diaspora. When it assumed office, it was expected to make the most of its overseas friends. Sadly, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's speech at an NRI dinner in New York apart, the Government has been doing nothing. An "orange card" scheme, conceived as a halfway house to dual citizenship, was announced and promptly forgotten. Nor has there been any attempt to tap grey cells. Since the immediate provocation is an economics prize, it is sobering to note that the prime minister's much-vaunted Economic Advisory Council contains not a single NRI name.

For a civilisation whose past has been a virtual embodiment of assimilation and receptivity, contemporary India displays a remarkably closed mind. It is distrustful of the outsider, diffident in the face of an untried idea and unwilling to give even its prodigal sons a stake in its well-being. To take but one example, the recent Resurgent India Bonds brought $4.2 billion from NRI accounts into the Government's coffers. In the smug satisfaction that followed, it struck nobody that the inflow could be doubled, even quadrupled, if NRIs wanting to set up businesses in India were allowed special clearances. Diplomatically too, the diaspora can prove invaluable. In the US, as the Vajpayee regime may be coming to realise, the Indian community is socially and economically among the ethnic elite. Its ability to mould political fortunes is immense, especially in a country whose polity is extraordinarily ignorant about India. Of course, the NRI can only convince others if he is convinced himself. He will certainly not be if the Indian ruling class persists in treating him as an exile who should somehow feel sorry for having jumped ship. Unfortunately, the India-NRI relationship carries too mixed an emotional burden to sort itself out with piecemeal measures. This is a time to be audacious. Perhaps the BJP Government could yet redeem its pledge on dual citizenship. Perhaps it could do so on December 10, the day Amartya Sen receives his calling's most supreme honour.

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