Onlineopinion.com, 19 Dec 2008
Residents of the South Indian city of Bangalore, once an orderly enclave of colonial-era buildings and well tended gardens, have started wearing earplugs to dampen noise from the maelstrom on their chaotic streets. It is the noise of growth boosted in part by the return of many of India’s technologists whose departure to the west was once bemoaned as a brain drain.
Call centres, software and engineering companies and some of the world's most advanced research centres prosper on the capital - both human and monetary - of Indian émigrés recently returned from abroad with foreign passports, foreign bank accounts and families sometimes more Western than Indian.
Bangalore's frenzy is emblematic of the reverse brain drain - or reverse diaspora - that helped propel India onto the world stage in ways that were unimaginable just a few decades ago. While Indians still go abroad to work and study - there are a record 80,000 Asian Indian students now enrolled in US universities - a new class of Indian expatriates, fluent in the ways of the West, energises India.
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