E-Paper
From brain drain to brain gain
This article is authored by Sarika Bhattacharyya, VP, Institutional Advancement, Plaksha University.
India recently announced 120 PM research chairs — a government scheme to bring senior academics and researchers from abroad into Indian universities. It is a welcome move. But the scheme, as currently designed, applies only to public institutions. Private research universities are excluded. This single flaw risks limiting the programme's reach before it has even begun. If India is serious about building research capacity at scale, this discrimination must go.
The announcement comes at a pivotal moment. India is placing big bets on Artificial Intelligence (AI), semiconductors, and deep technology. The government knows that this ambition cannot be built on services talent alone. It requires researchers, doctoral pipelines, and universities that do more than teach. The research chair scheme signals that this reality has registered at the top. What it does not yet reflect is a coherent strategy to act on it.
India has the world's largest diaspora. More than 18 million people of Indian origin live abroad. In the US, Indians make up over 6% of the STEM workforce. Nearly one in ten Silicon Valley startups has an Indian-origin founder. Indian-origin inventors account for roughly 12% of all foreign-born patent holders in the US, with strong representation in software, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and AI.
This is not a story of loss. It is a story of Indian talent thriving when it finds the right environment. The US built that environment through meticulous, sustained investment over decades. India, by contrast, spends less than 0.7% of GDP on research and development, compared with 3.1% in the US, 2.4% in China, and over 4% in Israel and South Korea. This gap is not merely about funding. It reflects how India has consistently underrated its universities as strategic national infrastructure.
What has changed is the urgency. Until recently, India primarily lost talent at the master's and doctoral stages. Today, top students are leaving straight after school, choosing undergraduate programmes abroad because they offer early research access, interdisciplinary learning, and clear pathways into global innovation ecosystems. Students are not rejecting India. They are responding rationally to where ambition is most easily pursued.
The risks are most acute in deep technology. These sectors cannot be built on services talent. They require strong doctoral pipelines, high-risk long-horizon research, and close coupling between universities and industry. If talent migration continues unchecked, India risks funding deep-tech ambition while outsourcing deep-tech capability. Venture capital cannot substitute for weak research pipelines. National missions cannot succeed if the underlying intellectual capital is developed elsewhere.
Many countries have tried to reverse brain drain through relocation incentives, short-term visiting roles, or honorary appointments. These approaches misunderstand how modern expertise works. Global professionals today are embedded in dense ecosystems of labs, capital, collaborators, and markets. Asking them to disengage and uproot is neither realistic nor necessary. Impact does not require permanent presence. It requires continuity, agency, and institutional seriousness.
Countries that have successfully converted diaspora strength into national advantage focused on integration, not repatriation. Israel built deep academic and research networks decades before large-scale physical return. China's Thousand Talents programme offered real labs, funding autonomy, and leadership authority. Singapore and Ireland scaled joint appointments, industry-funded research, and globally networked faculty models. The lesson is consistent: global talent contributes when institutions are credible and roles are real.
A serious brain-gain strategy requires structural reform. Brain gain will not come from appeals to patriotism; it will come from building institutions that global talent can trust with their time, their teams, and their life's work.
First, joint appointments with industry must be encouraged and incentivised. Faculty should be able to move fluidly between academia, startups, and industry. More importantly, joint appointments provide a credible mechanism to engage globally embedded Indian talent without requiring permanent return, while offering continuity, leadership responsibility, and the ability to build serious research platforms in India.
Second, industry-funded research must be normalised. Long-term partnerships, not transactional grants, are essential to anchor universities in national priorities. With overall R&D spending still below 0.7% of GDP, universities lack the funding depth that globally competitive research careers demand. Normalising industry-funded research is central to creating the financial scale and career pathways required to attract and retain top faculty and globally mobile talent.
Third, India needs a coordinated national effort to build globally benchmarked research laboratories within universities. These must be autonomous labs with sustained funding, international collaboration, and clear research mandates, designed for depth and longevity.
Fourth, PhD programmes must be reimagined. Interdisciplinary research, global co-supervision, industry-linked problem statements, and competitive financial support are no longer optional if India is to build a serious research pipeline.
Fifth, all central government schemes to attract faculty from abroad must be open to all public and private research universities, not just public institutions. It is imperative that we eliminate such discrimination if we want to build scale and capacity in serious R&D.
Encouragingly, a new generation of Indian universities has shown that flexible compensation, research-first roles, and globally benchmarked academic titles can attract post-doctoral researchers and young faculty. This is a model that established institutions, including publicly funded ones such as the IITs, will need to adopt at scale.
The 120 PM research chairs are a step in the right direction. But a step is not a strategy. India has the diaspora, the ambition, and now, at least in part, the political will. What it still needs is the institutional seriousness to match — and the wisdom to not exclude the very universities leading the way.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Sarika Bhattacharyya, VP, Institutional Advancement, Plaksha University.
