India’s reverse diaspora

But the view inside the Infosys campus is buoyant with double-digit profit margins, revenues in the low billions of dollars, and plans to hire thousands of new employees worldwide over the next several years, with food courts, gyms and a putting green for employees, including returnees from abroad attracted by the Western-style work environment and generous pay cheques. In an interview with the New York Times, Nandan M. Nilekani, Infosys chief executive and co-founder, said, "Expatriates are returning because India is hot".

Typical of those young Indians moving Infosys into the top ranks of global companies is Smita Agrawal, a savvy marketing manager who has worked in Tokyo, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Little Rock, Arkansas. Preferring Western business attire to saris, she nevertheless finds India to her liking. "After-office hours is where you lose out in the USA," she says. "There's a cultural gap in America and you just don't have the face-to-face interaction with Americans that we have here in India." Confessing that, "Bangalore and its messiness take some getting use to," Agrawal nevertheless sees India as a place to enhance her career.

Peers at companies from Yahoo! to startups that only the digital cognoscenti would recognise agree that being part of the reverse diaspora has its satisfactions, both professional and cultural.

In Bangalore and other major Indian cities, there’s no shortage of luxury shopping malls and housing developments to lure home expatriates who already are the highest-paid ethnic group in the US. At Palm Meadows, one of several gated communities in Bangalore where the computer-savvy elite live, it would be hard to find an Indian passport holder, aside from the maids and gardeners because most residents are citizens of US and UK or dual nationals.

Ajay Kela, chief operating officer of the software development company Symphony Services, looks around his neighbourhood of four-bedroom Spanish-style villas and says he made his decision in a day to pull up roots in Foster City, California, and return to India. "India is an efficient location for software design and besides, the middle class is exploding here," Kela says.

But the move back to India hasn't been problem-free, with grinding commutes over potholed roads, a yawning gap between educated and poor, and a mind-numbing conformity that inhibits the creative "outside of the box" thinking associated with Palo Alto or Raleigh-Durham. "There is raw talent in India," says Sridhar Ranganathan, a former Yahoo! executive and managing director of Blue Vector India in Bangalore. "But how to polish that talent is India's dilemma and my challenge."