Exodus of Indians. Why do so many Indians want to leave their country? Have any of the Indians on Gupshup given a thought?
Exodus
The jamboree that was the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas only shows up that swadeshi be damned, videsh is where middle India wants to be
SOUTIK BISWAS
The First Wave
Late 19th Century
Nature of migrants: Voluntary emigrants, traders, indentured labour
Destinations: Africa, Southeast Asia, West Indies
The Second Wave
1970s
Nature of migrants: Professionals and entrepreneurs
Destinations: US, Europe, West Asia
The Third Wave
The biggest one, happening now
Nature of migrants: White-collar professionals, students, diploma-holders.
Destinations: Canada, New Zealand, Australia, USA.
20,000,000
Indians Living Abroad
246,000
Indians who migrated to the US in the last two years
85,000
Skilled computer professionals leaving India every year contributing to annual ‘resource loss’ of $2 billion
11,000
Number of Indians who migrated to New Zealand in the last three years
5,000
Number of Indians who migrated to Canada in 2002
50
Percentage of IIT graduates leaving India every year
20
Percentage of medical school graduates leaving India every year
2
India’s rank among countries exporting people to the US. Mexico is number 1.
1
India’s rank among countries exporting students to the US. 90 per cent of them never return.
Narender Chandok, 48, is a Delhi-based businessman who runs a pool parlour and a small construction firm. His wife, Raka, 47, owns a beauty salon. They live with their three school- and college-going children Tanya, Gaurav and Petal in a three-storey family home in posh Defence Colony. The seemingly comfortably settled Chandoks are not exactly the archetype of a family that wants to quit India for a better life abroad, right? Not quite. A year ago, a neighbour returned from a holiday in Canada and told them of the good life there. The Chandoks gave migrating to Canada a good, hard thought. How would it be to begin a new life in a foreign land in their middle age? Would they be able to cope with the cultural dislocation? Were they ready to slog it out in hardscrabble supermarket and supervisory jobs? Much soul-searching later, the family applied for migration to give their children a better life and beat the creeping recession in India that they feel is slowly crippling first-generation businesses like theirs. They even got Raka’s brother, an accountant with a Delhi-based luxury hotel, to join the bandwagon. “You have to be excellent in India to survive,” says Raka. “If you are not and your children aren’t very bright, then you are sunk.” Then there’s the crime, pollution and the scramble for basic necessities. “You read the papers and worry every day about your children returning home safely, about your future. The system sucks.”
Far away, in lawless Patna, Man Mohan Jha, 52, a manager with steel ropes-manufacturer Usha Martin, is counting his days to July when he’ll get on a flight to the US, where he’s migrating to with his wife. “I am fed up with India,” says Jha. “Everything works on power and connections. There’s no scope for growth and security for people like us. It’s the insecurity and lawlessness that’s compelling me to leave. Otherwise, who goes to an alien land at this age?”
Hear out a desperate Nalin Gomes, 25, a Delhi-based online booking agency hand who’s sold his family apartment to raise money for migrating to Canada: “I work 16 hours a day and get Rs 10,000 at the end of the month. What does this money buy? In Canada, I want to be rich and successful in five years and run my own business.” Well-settled Delhi-based marketing consultant Manmohan Sethi, 48, who’s submitted his papers for migrating to Canada with his wife and two children, finds living in India “chaotic and unsafe”. "If my children’s schoolbus is delayed by 30 minutes, I’m in a state of panic.
When we go out, I don’t know whether we’d return home safely. I’m ready to burn my bridges and leave." Laments Amit Raisinghani, 28, an accountant with a Mumbai firm who has applied for migration to New Zealand, "I am just fed up with the low quality of life here. The pollution, overcrowding, the open corruption. How
long can you bear it?"
What’s happening? “People seem to have given up on India,” says B.S. Sandhu, who runs Worldwide Immigration Consultancy Services (WWICS), India’s biggest agency helping people migrate. If it’s not the rage against a rotten system, it’s the lure of the lifestyle that’s been snaring people like Bangalore-based Joseph Prabhakar, 45, and his wife, Sagaya Mary, 30, who are packing their bags and migrating to New Zealand next month with their two children.Things had also begun to look a tad uncertain for Prabhakar, an engineering diploma-holder, after the electrical equipment company where he had been working for the past 25 years began slipping into the red.So he did what he thought was the smartest thing: he went on a tourist visa to New Zealand, got himself a job in a plastics company in Auckland, and has now returned for his family. “The lifestyle is swell. I can own a house much faster there, instead of a plot of land that I’ve bought in an area where there’s no electricity.
Then, there’s no corruption and everybody is equal before the law,” says Prabhakar. Wife Sagaya Mary says she will miss her relatives, “but we have to think of our future and our children”.
Make no mistake about it. These people are not loony mavericks leaving their country of birth in a fit and emigrating mid-career
with their families. They are among the legions of hopeless Indians who see a bleaker future than ever before in their homeland. They are families who did not find a place in last week’s platitude-soaked celebrations of Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, a flashy jamboree ‘honouring’ the Indian diaspora in Delhi. The rising economic uncertainty with the collapse of the old (and now, new) economy firms, the absence of a social security net, relentlessly rising crime and terrorism, the lack of clean air, water, enough good schools, and a venal political culture where power, pelf and connections matter most are triggering a fresh wave of near-panicky exodus of Indians. It is also helping enormously that countries like Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the three most sought-after countries, are inviting migrants through a passmark system. “The greatest thing about migrating,” says Abdul Majid, 36, a Vancouver-based architect who migrated to Canada with his family three years ago, “is the feeling that I am finally a part of a civilised, law-abiding society and everybody is actually accountable”.
I promise I got a B in International Trade and Finance. Phir bhi saab kuch upar sey kyon guzar gaya? :Ana slapping herself silly to wake up:
, but u r right, it didn’t get us anywhere.