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To: skinowski who wrote (88407)	11/3/2007 3:36:44 PM
From: dipanjanc	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

Why would the best and the brightest young people compete so hard to enter a field where there was a 90% chance that they would have to either leave the country, or do something unrelated in order to make a living? Perhaps, the whole idea was to get education and then emigrate? License-permit raj, beauracratic quagmires. If you were not born in the right family and did not go to right schools, it was very hard to launch your own law or medical practices, or start tech businesses. Most lawyers and doctors ended up in dead-end government services and most scientists ended up teaching in mediocre-to-hopeless institutions with virtually no research infrastructure. For the vast majority of smart and hard-working Indians, emigration after an engineering degree was the fastest way out of poverty, and even more importantly, hopelessness. That's why the IIT and other engineering entrances used to be insanely competitive.

To: skinowski who wrote (88407)	11/3/2007 4:23:00 PM
From: arun gera	Respond to of 110194

>Why would the best and the brightest young people compete so hard to enter a field where there was a 90% chance that they would have to either leave the country, or do something unrelated in order to make a living?> Good question. Simple answer - very few well paying knowledge worker jobs were available in the 1980s. (In fact the situation is not very different today. If the outsourcing boom dies, knowledge worker wages will collapse.) Big companies had a lot of choice. The high quality educational institutions were few and typically government supported. Some engineering and medical institutions had impressive US like college campuses. There was also the promise of going abroad for higher studies These institutes were also meritocracies. So the ambitious students migrated towards them. That drew the better companies to recruit there, even if their requirement was non-engineering. Partly due to the fact that India was pretty much a pre-industrial agricultural society before the 1970s, and partly due to the socialist policies that allowed only a few firms to grow big. Even now the organized sector (companies with 10 or more employees) of the India economy only accounts for about 10 million jobs. See the following link: columbia.edu Papers/Transforming India Panagariya.pdf columbia.edu -Arun