India’s Brain Drain in the 21st Century: Challenges, Shifts, and Opportunities

Summary

The narrative of India’s brain drain is undergoing significant shifts in the 21st century, with new causes and effects, trends, challenges, and opportunities for both India and the migrants’ destinations. Despite all these shifts, however, talent flight and brain drain continue unabated from India to the rest of the world, creating the conditions for underdevelopment as a result of loss of human capital. Since the turn of the century, India’s brain drain (or high skill migration) has been primarily to the United States and other advanced countries. Nonimmigrant temporary visas for high-skilled foreign workers (H-1B in the United States) and student migration are important in understanding the size, scope, and determinants of brain drain. Various local and global capacities also shape brain drain from India. Benefits to India of such migration include (a) remittances, (b) return migrations, and (c) diaspora networks.