Open The Borders (March 17, 2006)

Ayesha Alam came to India as a student from Bangladesh. She studied at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. There, she met and subsequently married a fellow student, an Indian citizen. What should have led to an automatic citizenship for her actually became a decade-long ordeal of running from pillar to post. Unlike the millions of faceless migrants who choose to vanish in the large Indian melting pot, she opted to declare herself to the system.The system made her life so difficult that it wasn’t possible to concentrate on building a great career and contributing to the economy. Instead, her life revolved around getting her visa renewed and running from one law-enforcing agency to another. Over the years, her situation remained so uncertain that not once was she able to visit her family in Dhaka, even during emergencies. All along, while she was unusually well-qualified and could contribute great value, no one could tell for sure if she could work in India. For some time, she did work. With it came demands for bribes from local police, followed by threats and finally, when the citizenship did come through, she had had enough. Ayesha and her husband moved out of India. They were welcome in countries like UK, the US, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, Germany, and a few more. Who lost out in the process? The Indian IT and BPO industry is witnessing a rapid growth. In the last 30 years, it has succeeded in creating a million jobs and will create another million in the next five. There is little chance that, by itself, India can produce so many competent and globally deployable people. But look around. There are thousands of proficient people in neighbouring Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. We get them in hordes when they come here on student visas, but afterwards, we lose them rather than make them a part of our national resource pool. This is not to speak of the naturally porous border on all sides that every day brings in thousands of undocumented aliens, who come in and then spread out all over India and live forever after. Thanks to the difficulty in recognition by physical features and a lack of tracking systems like a social security number, no one can tell who is legitimate and who is not. Political parties have no views beyond the occasional vote bank issue. So, while New Delhi is full of immigrant maid servants, cooks and watchmen, highly qualified professionals from neighbouring countries, who could add disproportionate value to the economy, are kept out. The world has come to realise the value of high-quality immigration. India could become more than just a national economy; it could become a thriving regional hub. This, along with India’s democratic system, will prove to be attractive for people seeking to build a great career. Why should highly qualified Pakistani, Nepali or Bangladeshi professionals go thousands of miles away from home? They could get the value of professional work avenues and proximity to their own homelands by working in India. In turn, they would become change-agents and take back some of the good things we do. This would result in building a vibrant, regional eco-system that brings even larger global investments. Immigrants bring along great work culture and studies indicate that wherever immigrant workers have gone, contrary to popular belief, they have created two-way benefits for the receiving and home country. Immigrant workers create the workplace diversity essential to building innovation. One cannot imagine the pre-eminence of countries like the US without highly qualified immigrant workers. Guess who forms the single largest ethnic group among NASA scientists? Indians. Much smaller countries thriving in the global economy tell the same story. Look at Singapore. Smaller in physical size than the city of Bangalore, it has less than Bangalore’s population but it generates a per-capita GDP that is nine times larger than India’s. How does Singapore do it? It is no coincidence that for every 1,000 people, Singapore has ten times more migrants than India. It has become a platform for regional development and encourages highly qualified people to work out of Singapore. This in turn encourages companies to opt for Singapore as a base for operation and large funds are invested there for supporting those activities. For far too long, we have seen India as a country that sends people to work overseas. It is time that India attracted people of the world to come and work from here. It will call for a paradigm shift in our thinking, changes in archaic laws and the cleaning up of an exploitative mindset in the many law-enforcing agencies that handle immigration. Source : http://digvijayankoti.blogspot.in/2009/04/subroto-bagchi-speaks-all-articles-by.html