We all love to celebrate the IITs, those temples of modern Bharat that produce some of the brightest minds in the world. Every time a Bharatiya becomes the CEO of a big tech company abroad, our collective chest swells with pride. We see it as a win for Bharat, a sign of our rising stature in the global knowledge economy. But is it really?
Let’s pause for a moment and ask ourselves: Whose dreams are we actually building with our public institutions?
Each year, the Government of India spends between ₹10 to ₹15 lakh to educate a single BTech student at an IIT. The total budget allocated to IITs for 2024–25 is nearly ₹9,660 crore. Who pays this? Bharat’s taxpayer. You and I. The students pay only a small part of it and many don’t pay due to scholarships, reservations, or income-based exemptions.
Now here’s where it gets troubling.
More than 30–36% of IIT graduates end up migrating abroad. Among the top 100 JEE rankers, a recent IIT Bombay study found that over 60% are now settled in the US or Europe. And among those who stay, about 70% take up jobs in foreign multinationals like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, McKinsey etc working for foreign shareholders, foreign economies, foreign goals.
And less than 2–3%? That’s the proportion who choose to work with Bharat’s core institutions like ISRO, DRDO, BARC, or PSUs like BHEL or BEL.
Former ISRO Chairman Dr. S. Somanath, in a now widely discussed interview, gave voice to this very concern. He revealed: “Our best talents are supposed to be engineers from IITs. But they are not joining ISRO. If we go and try to recruit from IIT, no one joins. … After seeing the presentation [of ISRO salaries], 60 percent of people walked out.”
Imagine that. The organisation that launched Chandrayaan, built PSLVs, and powers Bharat’s space dreams cannot retain its own brightest minds—because a foreign job pays better.
This isn’t just brain drain. It’s state-sponsored cognitive export.
Before 1947, we exported raw materials like cotton, tea, diamonds to serve an empire. Today, we export brains. We pay for their training; the world reaps the returns. We celebrate personal success as national pride, without asking, where is the nation in all this?
Is this what Homi Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai, or Dr. Kalam dreamed of when they envisioned IITs? These institutions were meant to build Bharat’s scientific and strategic future, not to be finishing schools for foreign industry.
We don’t question this model because we’ve “internalised a colonial mindset”. We confuse individual prestige with national progress. We cheer when an IITian gets into Stanford, but shrug when ISRO struggles to recruit engineers. We post selfies with global CEOs, but forget that our own public-sector R&D is starving for talent.
Why is there no national service requirement for publicly funded elite education? Why can foreign companies recruit in IITs without investing in India’s R&D or technology infrastructure? Why do we call it “brain drain” and move on, as if it’s just another natural disaster?
What we need is not just a change in placement policy, but a change in mindset. We need a National Brain Retention Plan, a structured way to ensure that public-funded talent contributes meaningfully to Bharat’s development. Serving India should not be seen as a punishment or a fallback; it should be an honour.
The IITs were never meant to be pipelines for global tech giants. They were built to light up villages, advance atomic research, secure our borders, and shape a self-reliant nation. Until we return to that vision, Bharat will keep clapping for others’ progress, on our tab.
Think about it. Who really builds the nation?
Who builds the Nation?
