Many of us are making our fortunes elsewhere

John Denver’s 1969 Rendition of this song is famous, but my heartstrings are tugged more by the Peter, Paul and Mary version of 1967. That was just two years after the Hart-Celler Act amended America’s immigration laws and flipped around the overwhelmingly white, European tide to let millions of Asians in.

The Indian professionals who flocked to the U.S. over the past half-century haven’t exactly been “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”.

They’ve mostly emigrated because they found better opportunities (and a couple of Nobels) and prosperity.

The Indian emigres of the 21st-century had had nearly three decades of economic freedom. They haven’t seen a single big war, or famine, or large-scale repression. But go they do. I suppose it’s a curtain-raiser for 2050 when Indians will be the most numerous human beings on our planet, and they will spill over on crowded shores.

Still, it is depressing that white-taxpayers at home subsidise bad government-controlled banks and crooked businessmen, as many as 7,000 Indian (dollar) millionaires changed their domicile in 2017, up from 6,000 in 2016. The U.S. was not their only destination – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UAE were also popular. There are plenty more where they came from: a New World Wealth survey put India’s total wealth in 2017 at $8.23 trillion.

New Research data shows that the Indian population in the United States alone rocketed from 1.9 million in 2000 to 3.98 million in 2015. Of course, a big chunk of this inflow was thanks to the ‘IT generation’ – young software engineers or work visa who stayed on.

Think about it. This diaspora is not forsaking its motherland. It is working in top-drawer white-collar jobs or investing in businesses overseas and making it wealth. It is educating its children in the best universities abroad. It is hobnobbing abroad. It is holidaying abroad in Amalfi, Biarritz or the Costa Brava rather than Agonda, Benaulim or Canacona in India. Perhaps the exiles will return to their motherland when circumstances are more conducive, and their Diwalis will spen the platters with the best dishes given when the local Saraswati Shiksha Mandir gets the folks together for Navratri.

Meanwhile back home the distance between the haves and might-haves is widening by the day. A Knight Frank survey said 200 super-rich Indians had wealth of over $500 million in 2017. The rich in India are growing their wealth much faster than the global average. The Hurun survey said India’s wealth said we had 131 dollar billionaires last year, the third-highest in the world after the United States and China.

It’s good to feel positive about those of us who go abroad. But it’s worrying to remember that India’s gross domestic income per capita was $1,670 in 2016 compared with $56,810 in the United States.

If only those of us who stayed home were better at making an honest living. Sadly, we are not doing very well in crimping our genius for corruption, dishonesty, fraud, and evasion.

India did rather poorly in Transparency International’s 2017 Corruption Perceptions Index – scoring 40 points from 100, where one is most corrupt and 100 is very clean.

India’s 2017 score was unchanged from 2016 and slightly better than 38 points of 2014. Our rank was 81 out of 180 countries – a long way to go.