Money & love for India bring Indian Americans back
By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 03 November 2010, 09:11 IST
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Money & love for India bring Indian Americans back
Bangalore: What makes the second-generation Indian Americans find their ways back to India? Well, the answer comes in just two words - money and interest in their parental homeland. According to a study conducted by Sonali Jain, a postdoctoral associate at the Social Sciences Research Institute, Duke University, it's the emerging economy of the parents' homeland and the desire to learn more about it's ethnicity and heritage that stimulate the wish in them to return to India. Almost all the respondents were of the opinion that the availability of exciting professional career pathways in India was an important factor in their decision to come back to India. Another common assertion was that they found challenging opportunities in India because of the emergence of new industries, such as retail and media, and subsequent lack of skilled talent. Over the last 10 years, India's economy has grown over an average of 6.5 percent each year, which is a major reason behind the rising population of second-generation Indian immigrants in India. According to a report in The New York Times, there were 35,000 "returned nonresident" Indians in Bangalore in 2004. Another report in The Economist said that between 2003 and 2005, approximately 5,000 tech-savvy Indians with more than five years' experience in America returned to India. Apart from this, it's their personal attachments with India which also plays a key role their decision. In reflecting upon their return decisions, respondents noted that maintaining ties with India and Indian culture when growing up in the United States gradually strengthened their ties to India over the years. Some of the respondents also wanted to know why their parents have migrated to the U.S. The research was conducted in two phases, during the summer of 2008 and the spring of 2009. 48 second-generation Indian American professionals with U.S. citizenship living in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Hyderabad were being interviewed. Out of these, eight 'returnees' were entrepreneurs and 43 held Person of Indian Origin (PIO) or Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) cards. Both the PIO and OCI cards are based on Indian ancestry, allowing card holders to live and work in India. The rest of the respondents were on journalist, diplomatic, or employment visas. The study focused on respondents who had been living in India for at least six months prior to the interview. The respondents are the children of Indian immigrants who entered the United States between 1965 and the early 1980s as high-skilled professionals, graduate students, or under the family reunification scheme. As per the data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, in the year 2008, about 460,000 U.S.-born individuals had at least one parent born in India. Indian government is also looking to forge ties with overseas Indians in the last decade. In 2003, it declared January 9 Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD) or Non Resident Indian Day, and since then the first week of January has been dedicated to NRIs.

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