To: Mohan Marette who wrote (920 ) 2/28/2000 9:28:00 AM From: Mohan Marette Read Replies (1) | Respond to
**OT** India fights the brain drainIndian taxpayers footed the bill in the hope that one day the graduates would help reconstruct the nation. I was one such student . But poring over my textbooks late at night in the library of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), I would dream, not of India, but of America, the land of opportunity. Many students like me, indeed, left during those years, never to return. Over the next two decades, IIT graduates -- educated at the expense of Indian taxpayers -- played a major role in founding California's Silicon Valley . The personal computer revolution and the invention of the Internet made the demand for skilled labor mushroom to such gigantic proportions that even if every American child were to study nothing but science from now on, we would be unable to keep pace with demand in the decades to come.India has gone from an agrarian society to the cyber-revolution, bypassing intermediate stages such as the welfare state and the creation of social services. Perhaps it is time to enact legislation calling for a "Brain Trust." Funded by corporations like Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) which have drained India of its brains for decades, the trust could set up new institutes in India aimed at training students not in symbol manipulation, but in social thought. Such an effort is our only hope of creating the social infrastructure needed in the next century. redherring.com
