As Britain struggles to deal with the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s, a reverse brain drain is occurring as thousands of British Indians are returning to India to seek careers and fortunes there according to an article in the Daily Mail. That’s a sharp contrast to the 1960s when many Indians and other South Asians immigrated to Britain because they saw that country as the future. Today though, India is on track to become the third biggest economy in the world.
This is a country that has given the investor a return on assets of 20 per cent a year. For the past decade, the growth of the economy has been as much as nine per cent per annum. And India’s story is just beginning.
Patel added that he still knows how to milk a cow which goes down very well in Indian villages because most of his clients are Indian who trust the British link because:
They associate Britishness with honesty, integrity. It’s served me well. There’s still a lot of goodwill towards the English here.
However, he also noted that British Indians can arouse jealousy – especially those who flaunt their wealth and avoid socializing with other Indians by isolating themselves too much from the realities of Indian life:
Many of my fellow British Indians are living like the new maharajas of the 21st Century. And many of those who return choose to live in rich ghettos. I know shopkeepers who think, “These little rajas, they’re throwing their money around, so why not take it?” In London, if you live in Wembley but don’t integrate, you’ve got a problem. It’s the same here.
Otherwise and while Britain had benefited from a brain drain from the commonwealth to the mother country, India’s brain gain is now coming at Britain’s expense. In fact, the Confederation of Indian Industry in London describes the current trend of British Indians returning to India as the greatest migration of British citizens to India since the golden age of the British Empire with even British doctors being tempted by jobs at hospitals in India where the medical facilities rival the best of what the UK has to offer.
In other words, the career opportunities are now back in India for British Indians where one can also live like a maharaja in an economy that is still growing by leaps and bounds.
