The March 4th issue of Science Magazine (paid subscription required) features an essay by Raghunath A. Mashelkar, director general of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research and president of the Indian National Science Academy. The essay is part of Science Magazine’s “Global Voices” series. [Tip via Francis Assisi]

Five years ago, during my presidential address to the Indian Science Congress, I made a prediction: “The next century will belong to India, which will become a unique intellectual and economic power to reckon with, recapturing all its glory, which it had in the millennia gone by,” I told the gathering of 5000, among them the country’s prime minister.

…In this essay, I focus on the importance of returnees to poor countries such as India. I will examine how demographic shifts are creating shortages of skilled scientists and engineers in developed economies and leading to a new dynamic in human capital that is enabling some developing countries to emerge as “global R&D hubs.” I also address ways in which global funding sources can be leveraged in such countries to create new knowledge devoted to the global good.

Because most readers won’t have access to the full article I will quote liberally (about a quarter of the article) for your benefit.

Let me first address the issue of migration of talented students from the developing world to the developed world. In 1926, the distribution of scientific productivity was analyzed by Alfred J. Lotka of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in New York. The result of his investigation, which remains largely valid, was an inverse square law of productivity, by which the number of people producing n papers is inversely proportional to n^2. This means that for every 100 authors who produce, say, one paper in a given period of time, there are approximately 100/2^2, or 25 authors, who produce two papers and one author, who will produce 10 papers. Thirty years later, the same law was found to be applicable to patents.

This means that the bulk of scientific and technological creativity and productivity lies in the minds and abilities of a small number of highly talented individuals. Since India gained independence in 1947, the country has consistently lost such individuals to the developed world. The country’s leaders comforted themselves by assuming that the number of scientific émigrés was too small for a country of 1 billion people to worry about. But they were not considering Lotka’s law and so did not realize that by losing the top tier of talent, we also lost most of our intellectual energy.

A recent report by the United Nations Development Programme* estimates that 100,000 Indian professionals leave the country every year to take up jobs in the United States. If one considers the potential economic gains, which these exceptionally talented people could have brought to India, one realizes that the economic losses due to this mass migration are enormous.

Invariably it is assumed that the main driving force for the brain drain is economic. People go to the developed world in search of a higher income, so the theory goes. But I do not think material gain is the only reason. After all, according to a recent study by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the number of scientists and engineers who left Japan to work in the United States and who did not return jumped by 100% between 1995 and 1999. Yet Japan, unlike India, already is a developed country with many high-paying jobs. The Italian scientist Riardo Giacconi, a Nobel Laureate in Physics, summed up what might be the most important factor behind such a brain drain when he said: “A scientist is like a painter. Michelangelo became a great artist, because he had been given a wall to paint. My wall was given to me by the United States.”

Well said. I think many in India view going abroad as “selling out” and the NRIs have somehow sold their soul to corporate greed or “western values”. Definitely not the case as I see it. When India improves intellectual capital will flow back.

As the direction of the brain drain shifts away from developed countries, rather than toward them, shortages in R&D personnel in developed economies are likely to arise. And as that happens, there will be a greater drive toward multiple geographical and organizational sources of technology. The impact of such shortages can be seen by citing an example from the European Union (EU). For the EU to meet the goal set at the 2002 Barcelona Summit of increasing R&D spending as a share of GDP to 3% by 2010, the EU will have to add 700,000 new researchers to the workforce. As one EU representative put it recently, there will be a greater draw on “Third World researchers.” As the professional opportunities and personal comforts in their own countries increase, however, will these researchers prefer migrating to Europe or working in their own countries?

The incentive to stay put is greater than ever. When I returned to India in 1976, the personal comforts and professional opportunities there were unbelievably limited. I remember having to endure a 3-year waiting list to get my first telephone, a 2-year wait to buy a scooter, and a 6-month wait to buy a black-and-white TV. Today you can walk into a showroom and choose from among 20 TV models. And millions of mobile phones now are sold in India every month.

Now consider the professional side. In my earlier career as a scientist, it took me 2 years to buy a special type of flow meter that I needed for my work on polymers. It was a struggle to gain access to even a rudimentary computer. And scientific journals used to arrive by sea mail, which made it hard for us to remain up-to-date on current research. Now we have our own supercomputers and, thanks to the cyber world, our scientists read Science at the same time as their American counterparts!

Mashelkar ends with a bold proposal:

Multinational companies are locating their R&D resources in India to create proprietary knowledge for private good–that is, for the stockholders–through private funding. However, my dream is to create a global knowledge pool for global good through global funding. Here, India can become an agent for change. This global-good perspective could become the case in diverse sectors ranging from biotechnology to information technology to space research.

This dream already has some momentum. First, consider a pedagogical tool, the computer-based functional literacy (CBFL) program, developed by Indian software pioneer Faqir Chand Kohli. Within a mere 8 to 10 weeks and at a cost of a mere U.S. $2 (provided a discarded computer is supplied for free), an illiterate adult using this tool can read his or her first newspaper. In the past 2 years alone, 40,000 adults from five states in India have been made literate. If CBFL is launched as the technical engine of a national literacy movement, in less than 5 years, 200 million adult illiterates can learn to read. The same Indian innovation could be of great service to the rest of the world’s estimated 854 million illiterates too! To this end, the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras has created a low-cost wireless Internet access system that needs no modem and eliminates expensive copper lines. It is just what is needed to offer CBFL to low-income communities throughout India and beyond. The technology already is in use in many countries, among them Fiji, Yemen, Nigeria, and Tunisia, to name a few, and it has been licensed to manufacturers in India, Brazil, China, South Africa, and France.

To read the full article you can purchase this issue from the excellent Science Magazine.