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Ader Gandi, 49, arrived in Mumbai as a tourist and decided he wanted to stay. (Jehangir S. Pocha for the Boston Globe )


Indian immigrants enticed to go home
Stronger economy, old ties beckon
By Jehangir S. Pocha, Globe Correspondent | February 5, 2007

MUMBAI -- Lured by the booming Indian economy and fed up with living as outsiders in a foreign society, many Indian and other South Asian immigrants in the United States are returning to their homeland -- and bringing with them cutting-edge American skills.

"This is a happening place," said Ader Gandi, 49, a Pakistani-American mortgage broker from San Francisco who decided to become an art photography dealer in Mumbai, India's chaotic commercial capital, after arriving as a tourist two years ago. "Everywhere you look there are things coming up and happening that just weren't there two years ago -- there's just so much growth."

Spurred by market reforms and a dynamic entrepreneurial class, India's once-sluggish economy has been growing by about 7 percent a year for the last decade, faster than every country in the world except China. Many salaries have almost doubled since 2005, as has the country's stock market index.

This has opened vast new opportunities in multiple fields and infused much of urban India with a tremendous sense of possibility and optimism. Coupled with India's traditionally rich social life that's been made all the more rambunctious by prosperity, this offers returnees an intoxicating mix of professional and personal satisfaction.

"Let me put it this way -- after living 20 years in the Bay Area I had 80 telephone numbers in my cellphone and after living here two years I have 200," said Gandi. "Life in the US can get a bit lonely, but here there is something happening all the time. People don't wait until the weekend to party."

New Delhi is acutely conscious of the money and expertise that returning Indians bring to local businesses, nonprofit organizations, and universities, and has been welcoming its dispersed children back home with open arms. A Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs has been created and a number of incentives for returnees have recently been announced, including permitting them to hold dual citizenship for the first time. Various programs to attract Indian-origin intellectuals and professors to Indian universities have also been launched.

While the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs says about 50,000 overseas Indians have applied for the new "overseas citizen of India" status, there are no reliable figures for the exact number of Indians resettling permanently in India.

An officer at the Foreigners Registration Office in Mumbai that deals with returnees, and whose department's upholstered sofas and elegant paintings contrast with the grimy offices of other sections that service locals, said the numbers were doubling every month.

"India is shining," she said wryly, parroting a recent government public relations campaign.

The subtle sarcasm in the officer's voice is commonly echoed in a country where the promise of the future is also encumbered with the harsh realities of the present. For all its recent progress, India remains desperately poor, mismanaged, and often lawless. It struggles to cope with decaying cities, crumbling infrastructure, and a society beset with medieval-era problems such as caste divisions and religious prejudices.

Ironically, while India's burgeoning economy is the main driver of reverse migration, poverty is also playing a role. In a country where almost 750 million of its 1.1 billion people live below the World Bank's definition of poverty, labor is so cheap that even working-class families hire domestic help, whom they still call servants, to do the daily chores that keep American families occupied most evenings.

Many returnees, especially those with children, say this is one of the most attractive personal reasons for reverse-migrating from the United States where the costs and demands of child care, education, and managing after-school activities are spiraling.

Family ties are another driver. Anant Patel, 38, an engineer who lived for 12 years in the Chicago area and returned to India in 2003 to start a trading company, said he had grown tired of sustaining bonds with loved ones in India through expensive and brief two-week vacations every year.

"Now everything is available in India," Patel said. "The logic of staying abroad wasn't there anymore."

Most of the 1.2 million Indian immigrants who began streaming into the United States in the 1970s and '80s were basically economic refugees, so they face fewer barriers to return home than emigrants from countries rife with political repression. But even second-generation Indian-Americans are giving up the only life they have known in the United States to set up home in their ancestral homeland.

Prakash Shukla, whose parents immigrated to New York in the late 1960s, said he had a lucrative job with IBM when he decided to move to Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and work with the Tata Group, India's largest conglomerate.

"My parents were surprised," said Shukla, who is now the chief information officer of Indian Hotels Ltd., the Tata group company that recently bought Boston's historic Ritz-Carlton hotel. "My dad had gone to the US to study and stayed on because at that time getting a job in India was a huge problem. I love America and have close childhood buddies there. But I know India from so many visits and wanted to be here."

Shukla said his first few years were dogged with frustration at India's legendary bureaucracy and collapsed civic amenities. Because of these continuing problems, India continues to suffer a net "brain drain," and America continues to benefit from "brain gain," evidenced by the crowds outside the US Consulate's visa office here.

Nash Patel, 38, who lives in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., with his wife Anahita, 37, and their daughters, Jessica, 11, and Shanaya, 7, is one of those resisting moving back to India -- at least for now.

"It's nice to visit," Patel said in Mumbai recently . "But living is different. Apartments here are so expensive; there's no space for anything. In the US we've got our own home and the kids can play anywhere."

Nevertheless, Patel says he and his wife will probably return to Mumbai when they retire.



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