Indian talent in US waiting to be tapped

Updated on: Monday, March 14, 2011

With a desire to give back to their motherland, most Indian students in the US plan to return home offering a vast pool of talent that would bring top-rate higher education to India's young, a new study suggests.

India needs to recruit at least one million new faculty members for its college and universities if it is to meet the government's goal of making higher education available to 20 percent of young people by 2020.

India thus may be able to recruit some of the academic talent it needs from the more than 100,000 Indians currently studying in the US, suggests the study by Rutgers University, Pennsylvania State University and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS).

The survey of nearly 1,000 Indians who are either pursuing or have completed graduate study in the US found that only eight percent strongly prefer to remain in the US.

A majority, or 53 per cent, of them planned to return home from the United States after a few years of work, while 21 per cent said they were either in India already or were actively looking to return. The rest are undecided.

India's booming economy, better chances to secure a good job, the promise of an affluent lifestyle and being closer to family were the factors fuelling the movement home, the survey said.

The study finds the biggest factors deterring master's, PhD students, and post docs from returning to India are red tape, corruption, and absence of research opportunities, it said.

This could have the twin benefit of filling faculty shortages in India and helping new PhDs in the US who are struggling with a tight job market caused by cutbacks in public higher education.

Indian talent in US waiting to be tapped

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