Rhyming words have promoted many dubious ideas. Like ‘brain drain.’ Not long ago, everyone was talking about it, as though those of us who stayed behind in India had no brain at all. Yet, we enthusiastically debated the issue. The debate wasn’t over whether brain drain existed, but whether the government should stop it. Now, for some reason, I don’t hear anyone use that expression, though occasionally people do mention that our “brightest” go to the US. The reason for its disappearance isn’t that society felt our feelings needed to be protected. I think what has happened is that nobody truly believes brain drain is real—or at least not in the way it was once imagined.
To most Indians, “brain” still means an organ that is useful in cracking objective-type exams, or being good at any science. In that regard, the Indian brain has not expanded. It is just that the migration of ‘brains’ has not had any impact on India because there are so many brains. We have easily filled the spaces that the so-called bright vacated by leaving India. Not just that. The kind of people who were once considered ‘brains’ turned out to be merely people who were lucky enough to be born in the right homes. Just look at what happened when opportunities seeped down the social pyramid.
In fact, today, the children of the affluent who are inclined to “do science,” or whose parents want them to do it, leave India because they can’t compete with other Indians for admissions to any of the most sought-after engineering colleges. The children of IITians, generally, have little chance of getting into the Indian Institutes of Technology. The upper class is unable to compete with equality.
In any case, the migration of thousands of scientific ‘brains’ has not been a drain. When the upper classes vacate their monopolies, others step in to fill the gap. The elite have been quitting not only India, but also entire fields like hardcore engineering. In a world where parents want to be nicer, children are drifting towards more enjoyable or fashionable fields, like artificial intelligence, rocketry and marine biology. This gives other classes the chance to venture into what were once fiefdoms of the elite.
What diminishes in this process is the field’s prestige. This is how prestige works: the urban upper crust does something and insists that others regard it as “brainy” and lucrative. Others imitate them, slog for years, and achieve the capacity to do that “brainy”, hence prestigious, thing. Now they are invested in spreading the notion that whatever it is that are in is ‘brainy’. So more people in the lower rungs try to enter those fields. But they realize the rewards are not the same for them. Once the elite vacates something, those spheres lose their allure, they lose their prestige. (This happened to the civil services, too.) And they are even not lucrative anymore.
Older IITians now say that the current profile of the Indian engineer student is appalling. Older bureaucrats say the same of the civil services. Because now they seem to see the ‘brain’ as not just an organ that cracks an entrance exam, but as something that produces a “rounded personality,” by which they often mean quizzing and playing Carnatic music. That is what the IITians of my generation did. What they are trying to get at, which is true, is that India has suffered a class-drain (class-pass?), where were lost a significant portion of the upper middle-class.
From this disenchantment emerges the idea that the migration of people who are very good in science has reduced the quality of Indian intellectual life. There is a mainstream view that in India we have millions of science and engineering degree-holders but very few gifted people. And that those with any talent leave the country. Even so, it is not a ‘brain drain’ because those who left India could not have done much here.
Many years ago, a chief guest at a convocation ceremony at IIT Madras said, “Brain drain is better than brain in the drain.” I don’t know if it was his original joke, but what I know is that all of Madras got to know within hours, and how we all laughed. Some of them who laughed are American citizens now and they do not laugh anymore at India jokes. Now, no chief guest would crack such a joke, but that is not because India has become a cradle of scientific innovation.
For a scientific genius to have an impact, he or she needs the right environment, which is best created by a combination of capitalistic greed supervised or even funded by a government that knows what it is doing. American tech is largely the creation of the US government. That is why it is laughable that tech ‘bros’ keep talking about “small government.” Their own fortunes have been driven by government policy. American hype runs on global American culture.
There is, however, such a thing as a brain drain in one respect. It is not really about the migration of some people from India to the West. It is a drain within the sciences. Whatever gets hyped attracts the cream of scientific talent for years. And it also diverts the attention of enterprise, and even the government. Take the current hysteria around artificial Intelligence, for instance. It holds some promise of public benefits in the vague distant future, but if the past is any indicator, millions of ‘brains’ would work for billions of hours to create a whole new array of frivolous things. At the expense of scientific fields that are left reeling in neglect.
Just as the arts probably lost its best to the sciences, many sciences are losing talent to narrower domains of tech. Science, today, survives on hype. Modern medicine has been stuck for ages. It is not as transformative as it appears, especially if you are a healthy person. And, compared to a hundred years ago, we have not expanded our understanding of the nature of reality.
For instance, we still have no clue what gravity is at a fundamental level. That is brain drain.
(Stay and read more.)