Why India’s Brightest & Best Flee Abroad

Following the recent appointment of India-born and schooled Satya Nadella and Rajeev Suri as chief executives of Microsoft Inc and Nokia, this question has aroused great public interest and debate in academia. Neeta Lal reports WHY DO GRADUATES OF India’s beleaguered institutions of higher education (35,000 colleges, 700 universities), which can™t make the authoritative QS or Times Higher Education annual rankings of the global Top 200 universities, nonetheless succeed spectacularly abroad, often rising to apex-level positions in globally top-ranked professionally-managed companies? This question has aroused great public interest and considerable debate in Indian academia following the recent appointment of India-born and schooled Satya Nadella and Rajeev Suri ” both engineering graduates of the modestly-ranked Manipal (Karnataka)-based Manipal Institute of Technology ” as chief executive officers at Microsoft Inc, the world™s premier IT software development behemoth (annual revenue: $77.85 billion or Rs.484,149 crore), and the Finnish telecommunications conglomerate Nokia (annual revenue: Euro 12.7 billion or Rs.101,679 crore). Nadella and Suri are the latest additions to a long list of India-born and educated professionals heading offshore multinational corporations. Others include: Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo Inc; Anshu Jain, co-CEO of Deutsche Bank; Ajay Banga, CEO of MasterCard Inc; Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe Systems; Nikesh Arora, chief business officer at Google Inc; Ajit Jain, president, Berkshire Hathaway Inc, and Padmasree Warrior, chief technology and strategy officer, Cisco Systems Inc. Public confusion about this paradox is compounded by media and even academia euphoria about the success of Indian professionals in highly competitive workplaces in the US, Europe and the UK, among other countries. The uncomfortable question of why Nadella and Suri among a host of other technology and business professionals routinely flee abroad to enable and enrich foreign organisations and economies is glossed over. In a special feature (August 2011), the globe-girdling Time magazine described business management professionals as India’s leading export to western economies. It quotes a study conducted by Egon Zehnder of S&P (Standard & Poor) 500 companies, which found more Indian CEOs in US companies than of any other nationality except American. Indians lead seven companies; Canadians four. Among C-suite executives in the 2009 Fortune 500 were two mainland Chinese, two North American Chinese and 13 Indians, according to a study by two professors of the Wharton and China Europe International Business School, wrote Carla Power in the special issue of arguably the world’s most widely read English language weekly. However euphoria induced by the extraordinary achievements of Indian professionals in foreign countries is not universal. There are some political pundits and monitors of the Indian economy who are inclined to derive logical conclusions from this strange phenomenon. Rajiv Desai, a well-known Delhi-based columnist and president of Comma Communications, questions the misleading triumphalism which trumpeted the Nadella and Suri ascensions in India. It is vital not to be misled by triumphal media which adulates the success of Nadella, Indra Nooyi and others as feathers in the nation’s cap. True, these are men and women shaped by India’s higher education system. But…