INDIAN BRAIN-POWER

What is America’s most valuable import from India? It may very well be brainpower. To begin with, only smart Americans had spotted the talented Indian techies. Hundreds of thousands of well educated Indians have come to the U.S. in recent decades many to work in the computer & software industries. And now a number of countries have joined the queue for Indian wonder kids. Only recently, Japan has communicated that it wishes to recruit 10,000 Indian techies over the next 3 years. Italy has said it needed some 8,000 IT workers .The most significant of all is the Singapore’s dialogue with former foreign minister Mr.Jaswant Singh, “We simply want your brains.”

The best & brainiest among them seem to share a common credential: They’re graduates of the IIT. Put Harvard, MIT & Princeton together, & you begin to get an idea of the status of IIT in India. Last year, 178,000 high school seniors took the entrance exam, just over 3,500 were accepted, or less than 2%. Compare that with Harvard, which accepts about 10% of its applicants. The IITs probably are the hardest school in the world to get into the best of my knowledge. Microsoft, Intel, PCs, Sun Microsystems, I can’t imagine a major area where Indian IIT engineers haven’t played a leading role.

Also, the U.S. needs Indian intellectual capital to understand the complexities of data-emanating from earth-science-satellites. “If you can do it for Microsoft, why not for earth sciences or space technology?” asked James Dodge, director of earth sciences at the NASA.

The world is moving into a knowledge era, but nobody should think that Indians are raising fast the world only in computer software. They are rising fast in all fields. The Pulitzer Prize for literature has been won by Jhoompa Lahiri, the Booker prize by Salmaan Rushdie, Arundhati Roy & Kiran Desai. Mr.Laxmi Mittal, Ratan Tata adds up to the list of Indian brain-power.

In the few decades, we can look forward to the creation of a huge global brain-power network of 50 million people of Indian origin. They will matter in academics, business, stock-markets, law, medicine & the arts. And so they will matter in politics too. Finally, there is no alternative for Indian brain-power because “kuch baat hai jo hasti mit-ti nahi hamari….”

Palak Maheshwari(IV Sem)