ISAS Working Papers

Beginning as a trickle in the 1950s, the skilled migration to the developed countries, that picked up in after the mid-1960s, gathered force with the more recent migration of the IT workers and, later nurses, contributing to the large presence of skilled Indian migrants in the labour markets of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, other European countries, and Australia-New Zealand. The Indian diaspora, which provides the overall basis of the size of this skilled Indian labour force in the global labour market, was estimated to be 20 million at the end of the 20th century and is now thought to have grown to 25 million. These figures also marks a positive reversal of the contemptuous sentiments expressed about the highly-educated or skilled knowledge workers supposedly ‘deserting’ India, as also about the indifference shown by the authorities concerned to the condition of the large scale labour migrants to the Gulf. With the genesis of this indifference rooted in the neutrality of the non-aligned movement spearheaded by Jawarhalal Nehru and later pursued by Indira Gandhi (when the destinations of the earlier Indian labour diaspora were the Caribbean, and South and East Africa), there is a novel international economic relations context here that poses a “double challenge” for public policy in India: one, to recognise and convince its diaspora of the strategic importance of migration, both as a challenge and an opportunity for India to view it as a tool of participation in the global labour market and; two, to rethink the process of human capital formation in India with a transnational perspective, so that it is redefined in terms of average labour productivity at home and incorporates the cooperation and collaboration of the migrants’ destination countries. Section 2 of the study is on the general contextual background of India, highlighting those aspects of the demographic, economic and dynamics of the internal/domestic labour market that have had a bearing on the evolution of the trends and policies of international migration from India that followed. Section 3 is devoted to the skilled and semi-skilled labour migration to the Gulf, beginning mainly as an overflow of the domestic labour market and in the light of the remittances it generates to India with the resultant implications for human capital formation. It also deals with the socio-economic impact of Gulf migration on the states of origin in India, with particular focus on skill and human capital formation in the state of Kerala. Section 4 is devoted to India’s transnational connectivity through high skill migration to the developed countries, including an analysis of how these connectivities have empowered the migrants to create capabilities to participate in the global labour market. In particular, it also highlights the socio-economic empowerment of Indian migrants in the developed-country labour market of the United States. Section 5 deals with the evolution of, and changes in the Indian thinking on migration and the policy debates and public discourse connected with them. Section 6 includes a list of measures undertaken by the Government of India with the aim of strengthening both international economic relations and for the participation of Indians in the global labour markets – mainly for the highly skilled, but also the semi/unskilled. The concluding section is a commentary on whether and how migration has changed society in India; contributed to its economic and social development, and empowered or could empower the country to face the challenge of international economic relations on the one hand and consolidating the base of human capital formation on the other. It also provides a discussion for evolving a methodology of how the Indian diaspora could be reclassified for analysing its role in the global labour market.