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Return To India (R2I)
NRI techies head back
home (By Revathy Menon)
It’s
boom time for techies all over again. And this time, it’s
the young NRI’s who are reaping the benefits, as they take
this opportunity to return to their roots, while the companies
get to pick from the cream of Indian IT talent abroad. And
in Hyderabad, the new IT hub the trend is more than obvious.
Riding the wave of the IT revival in India, all big names
like Wipro, Infosys, Satyam have stepped up recruitments.
And in doing so, they have attracted young NRI professionals
eager to return. Most of these highly qualified youngsters
are gradually filling up top and middle level positions of
the companies. Although the figures vary for different organisations,
most companies estimate that anywhere between five and 12
percent of the profiles they receive for these positions are
from NRIs.
Says Santosh Kumar Mishra, HR Manager Wipro, Hyderabad, “A
sizeable number of resumes that we received, in the last one
or two quarters, have been from people who are looking to
come back from abroad. In fact, two to three senior positions
in the company have recently been filled by such persons.”
Kalyan Vadrevu, HR manager at Mensamind, agrees. He points
out two reasons why this trend is on the rise. “For one there
is an increasing demand here, and secondly a lot of companies
are closing down abroad. Besides, recruiting returnees’ works
for us too. They have the interpersonal skills needed, they
have ample exposure and a good three-four years of experience,”
he says.
Rohit Kumar, Vice President and COO, Global Energies and Utilites
Practice at Wipro, is one such person. A business graduate
from Wharton, Rohit worked in Oracle, US for five years in
a senior position, before he decided to return to India.
“The most important decision that persons like me have to
make when we decide to come back is being willing to settle
for a third of the salary we used to make. But the advantages
of coming home outweigh the disadvantages by far. You are
close to your family and you can lead a much better lifestyle
than you would abroad. Ever since I have returned I have received
e-mails from my friends who are thinking of coming back,”
says Rohit.
From....
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
Rooster's Call
A
life well lived is coming home to do something besides, money
being no object By
SUGATA SRINIVASARAJU
So,
is there more to the story of the returning NRI, the Bollywood
superstar 'slumming it' role and the developmental innovations
of a former Citibanker. Of course there is, and one way to
see it is to take a walk to the Vinayaka temple in Chennai's
Besant Nagar, where it isn't uncommon to see traditionally
dressed elderly couples shod in out-of-the-box new Nike trainers.
The only variant-many parents will now have been joined by
the footwear supplier, the NRI offspring.
For
reasons ranging from bad (the dotcom fallout and the still-hurting
knock-on effects) to good (the engineer/mba path is still
a safe career bet, and if you're into anything radical, India's
never been a better place to set up shop), NRIs have been
returning to India in huge numbers. In Bangalore alone, something
like 35,000 ex-NRIs have 'returned' over the past five years.
This may dwarf the number in other metros, but the total for
India over this period is at least 50,000.
And
the numbers are growing. Last July, nearly 1,000 people of
Indian origin, or PIOs, attended a job fair organised by a
magazine in Santa Clara, California, and offered their resumes
to companies planning operations in India. A Wipro job fair
too met with similar enthusiastic results. Bhaskar Sanyal
of IBM, who returned six months back from Singapore to manage
a global IT project out of Bangalore, confirms the growth:
"In the SAP community alone, we recruited 10-12 returned
NRIs in the last three months." He also receives a lot
of e-mail enquiries because he is known in the techie community
to be pretty thorough with PIO procedures and taxation. CISCO
director Srikanth Hoskote, who returned last April, also speaks
about the huge volumes of mail from people who want to return.
Still,
IT isn't quite the international meal ticket it was during
the boom towards the end of the last decade, so it isn't surprising
that most of the returnees are industry professionals. But
the numbers are also made up of a number of remarkable artistes,
bankers, entrepreneurs, lawyers and teachers, to name just
a few. They are coming back to an India that is changed not
so much for the Nike or Levi's or a certain quality of life
but one which provides the means to the same "fulfilment",
material and otherwise. Perhaps, even more crucially, these
NRIs are coming back to India because they really want to,
and not particularly because they need to.
Consider
Ramesh Ramanathan's experience. As head of one of Citibank's
key European businesses, this bits Pilani/Yale University
alumnus had already stretched the envelope of the South Indian
middle-class dream. But his motivations were focused by a
deceptively simple issue. He describes NRI gatherings where
they would have the usual conversations on India's ills: "The
more Swati (his wife) and I thought about it, the more we
realised that we were successful not just because of our own
effort but because there was an invisible 'system' that enabled
this search for excellence and accomplishments...that ensured
the streets were clean, the garbage got picked up.... We began
to believe that we had to return, that it was the obligation
of our generation to build these systems back in India,"
he writes on the website of Janaagraha, an organisation the
Ramanathans started in Bangalore to engage citizens, government,
NGOs and the corporate world with a view to achieving greater
citizens' participation in local government. In practice,
this means the often difficult task of finding effective ways
of working towards laudable goals such as a demonstrably usable
implementation of the 'Right To Information' legislation,
for instance.
Nevertheless,
it would be naive to suggest that India's infamous brain drain
is about to get reversed anytime soon.Intangibles like nostalgia
may play a role, but for the most part these individuals make
a success out of coming back to the motherland since hard
facts back it up, like the exposure, education, growth, and
not least, earnings that they got out of their foreign stays.
In recent years, a two- to three-year India stint with a multinational
firm has emerged as a challenging but potentially rewarding
attraction. Many NRIs have found the luxury of living in India
on a dollar-denominated salary impossible to resist when there's
a career opportunity thrown in.
Certainly,
when the money is there, the living can get a lot easier.
Techie Aravind Sitaram and his artiste wife Soumya sold their
Silicon Valley home and their cabin in California's Stanislaus
national forest to move to a farmhouse outside Bangalore which
hardly offers less in terms of "connectivity". Not
far away is Adarsh Palm Meadows, a plush returnee NRI colony
similar to gated communities in other metros. Architect Vankulapathi
Vinay even moved from Sydney to Bangalore because he sensed
correctly that there would be a demand for people who could
design houses similar to what NRIs had seen abroad.
But
not everybody is looking at India with the sort of long-term
vision that encompasses house-building. While the number of
successful returnees is significant, the majority, especially
in cities like Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad, are from
the infotech industry, and it's unlikely that the hiring triggered
by, say, a jump in the tech-heavy Nasdaq index would necessarily
keep many of them in India for very long. Certainly not as
long as Java remains the second language of choice after Telugu,
Kannada or Tamil. Economic opportunity is still the most potent
of all motivations.
Such
opportunity is certainly emerging in India, but it is still
some way off the phenomenal transition that hit cities like
Shanghai a decade ago; Viya's Goyal describes how overseas
Chinese brought themselves-and their money-in hordes when
they scented the sheer scale of big bucks to be made from
a giant and fast-growing economy. No one's doubting India's
potential, but the reality could take a while yet. Which is
why many NRIs are still hedging their bets, short of making
a clear commitment to India. It's also why people like Shivram,
much feared by luckless fellow students at both bits Pilani
and IIM Calcutta for his sharp tongue, cheerfully lets slip
a suitably tart acid drop about the hypocrisy inherent in
the biological impossibility of hearts in one place and heads
in another!
Luckily,
there has been a seismic change which has revolutionised Indian
society in between; an emergence of realistic career opportunities
that veer radically away from the doctors, lawyers and engineers
so beloved of middle-class India. That's why a former investment
banker like Goyal can find both meaning and money out of selling
Vietnamese lacquer bowls, while another, like Ramanathan,
finds comparable if rather different fulfilment in helping
local governments become more transparent to their citizens.
Perhaps even more importantly, India has shed enough socialist
baggage that it no longer necessarily sees some trades as
being morally superior to others. There's hope yet for India's
emergence as a legitimate professional goal, it's certainly
no longer a place to flee.
Sugata
Srinivasaraju with inputs from Labonita Ghosh in Calcutta
and Shobita Dhar, Hari Menon in New Delhi
[Published
in Outlook Magazine]
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