Many years ago I met a person who worked at an US think tank. They had done a study for the US government in the 1990s and calculated that the cost to the US state of producing a world class Engineer or a management graduate was in the region of US$ 250,000 to US$300,000. So they advocated an easy visa policy for such individuals so that the US could get such easily trained persons at short notice. He also mentioned that this was a strange situation where the developing country was actually subsidising he developed country and getting aid with very high multiplier effects from them
This person also said that they studied the racial origins of Maths Ph.Ds and found that hardly any US Caucasian was doing a Ph.d in Maths. They realised its importance to the future of computing and recommended to the US government that when person gets a Maths Ph.d degree from a good university the US government should immediately confer an US citizenship on that person.
This shows the nuanced understanding of the US system on the role of human resources and how to quickly absorb and leverage such resources when they come your way.
After decades of losing our smart people to the West we are now in a position to reclaim back our prized assets namely our talented people who are now well trained. In unregulated fields like management and engineering this does not require any policy changes. This may partly explain the explosion in new ventures in engineering and technology in India by returning diaspora. However other regulated fields such as medicine require regulatory approval and need policy interventions and procedural changes to make time bound the approval process to include such professionals in our workforce.
This also includes the need to harmonise the degrees as different countries in Europe, the US may give different names to the same education. Even in India, the Post graduate education in management is called Post Graduate Diploma in Management in one Government institution and the Masters in Business Administration by another Government institution. The same degree in Engineering is called Bachelor of Technology in an IIT and Bachelor of Engineering in some other government engineering college.
In this regard we should learn from the US system which is very alert to study the various degrees in other countries and recognise them appropriately and harmonise them with their system.
This requires us to have a fast track method to study and validate equivalence of various degrees and issue requisite permissions in a time bound manner for talented and trained Indians to come back and join the workforce.
This could be a bottleneck in medicine and other fields.
This is an issue as I personally found out in the case of one of my neighbours Anirban and Sonali. Anirban is an IIT Bombay graduate and Ph.d from Princeton University. He and his wife Sonali wanted to return to India and work in India and do something for the country. He is a faculty at IISER, Pune Sonali is a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine who practises in India. Her degree is the equivalent of MD in America but it is not accepted in India. As a result she is not able to practice in India. As a result they are living in separate continents despite having a small child also now. The details of this case is in this blog.
The Government should look into this case and more importantly the policy to remove all bottlenecks and make the best of this opportunity. If we are able to get 10,000 highly trained people we could easily save $ 500,000 per individual in training people to this level which would amount to taking a gift of $ 5 billion or Rs 35000 crores from US and Europe . This does not even include the downstream effects of employment generation and taxes generated for the country and the rapid advancement that would be possible within a short time. Needless to say it would take us at least 15-20 years to build up a bank of such competent people if we did it from scratch not to mention the significant costs.
This person also said that they studied the racial origins of Maths Ph.Ds and found that hardly any US Caucasian was doing a Ph.d in Maths. They realised its importance to the future of computing and recommended to the US government that when person gets a Maths Ph.d degree from a good university the US government should immediately confer an US citizenship on that person.
This shows the nuanced understanding of the US system on the role of human resources and how to quickly absorb and leverage such resources when they come your way.
After decades of losing our smart people to the West we are now in a position to reclaim back our prized assets namely our talented people who are now well trained. In unregulated fields like management and engineering this does not require any policy changes. This may partly explain the explosion in new ventures in engineering and technology in India by returning diaspora. However other regulated fields such as medicine require regulatory approval and need policy interventions and procedural changes to make time bound the approval process to include such professionals in our workforce.
This also includes the need to harmonise the degrees as different countries in Europe, the US may give different names to the same education. Even in India, the Post graduate education in management is called Post Graduate Diploma in Management in one Government institution and the Masters in Business Administration by another Government institution. The same degree in Engineering is called Bachelor of Technology in an IIT and Bachelor of Engineering in some other government engineering college.
In this regard we should learn from the US system which is very alert to study the various degrees in other countries and recognise them appropriately and harmonise them with their system.
This requires us to have a fast track method to study and validate equivalence of various degrees and issue requisite permissions in a time bound manner for talented and trained Indians to come back and join the workforce.
This could be a bottleneck in medicine and other fields.
This is an issue as I personally found out in the case of one of my neighbours Anirban and Sonali. Anirban is an IIT Bombay graduate and Ph.d from Princeton University. He and his wife Sonali wanted to return to India and work in India and do something for the country. He is a faculty at IISER, Pune Sonali is a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine who practises in India. Her degree is the equivalent of MD in America but it is not accepted in India. As a result she is not able to practice in India. As a result they are living in separate continents despite having a small child also now. The details of this case is in this blog.
The Government should look into this case and more importantly the policy to remove all bottlenecks and make the best of this opportunity. If we are able to get 10,000 highly trained people we could easily save $ 500,000 per individual in training people to this level which would amount to taking a gift of $ 5 billion or Rs 35000 crores from US and Europe . This does not even include the downstream effects of employment generation and taxes generated for the country and the rapid advancement that would be possible within a short time. Needless to say it would take us at least 15-20 years to build up a bank of such competent people if we did it from scratch not to mention the significant costs.
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