Indian Skilled Migration and Development: To Europe and Back

This edited contribution explores strategies and measures for leveraging the potential of skilled diasporas and for advancing knowledge-based evidence on return skilled migration and its impact on development. By taking the example of Indian skilled migration, this study identifies ways of involving returned skilled migrants in home country development as well as proposes approaches to engage the diaspora in development. As high-skill immigration from India to mainland Europe is a rather recent phenomenon, the activities of Indian professionals in Europe are under-researched. The findings have wider application in contributing to the policy dialogue on migration and development, specifically to the advantage for developing and emerging economies. The book employs an interdisciplinary, two-fold approach: The first part of the research looks at how international exposure affects the current situation of skilled returnees in India. The second, European, part of the research examines migration policies, labour market regulations and other institutional settings that enable or hinder skilled Indians’ links with the country of origin. Structural differences between the host countries may facilitate different levels of learning opportunities; thus, this book identifies good practices to promote the involvement of Indian skilled diaspora in socio-economic development. In applying the framework of diaspora contributions as well as the return channel to study the impact on India, the book draws on qualitative and quantitative research methods consisting of policy analysis, in-depth interviews with key experts and skilled migrants and on data sets collected specifically for this study.

Gabriela Tejada is Senior Scientist at Cooperation and Development Center (CODEV) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, where she leads the research line on scientific diasporas, migration and development. Her research agenda focuses on the links between skilled migration and home country development and on diaspora transnationalism. She has studied countries such as Colombia, South Africa, India, Moldova and Tunisia. Her research has been funded by grants from institutions such as the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and the Swiss Network for International Studies. At EPFL, she is involved in the promotion of scientific cooperation activities with emerging and developing countries. She obtained her primary degree in International Relations from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico and she holds a PhD Cum Laude in Political Science from the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona in Spain.

Uttam Bhattacharya is Associate Professor of Economics at the Institute for Development Studies, Kolkata (IDSK), India. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Calcutta. He served as Guest Lecturer with the Department of Economics at Vidyasagar University in Midnapore, West Bengal and at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. Prior to this, he was attached to the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta (CSSSC). His current work at IDSK is on Indian industrial development, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and Indian research and development. He is also in the process of editing a book on the development of capital goods in India. His main areas of research include the machine tool industry in India and the scope for self-reliance, IPRs and India, the Indian patent system, Indo-Australian economic relations, migration, child labour and the education of children in India, micro-finance and poverty eradication, local governments and development.

BinodKhadria is Professor of Economics at the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, School of Social Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi; he is also the Director of International Migration and Diaspora Studies (IMDS) Project. His published works on migration include The migration of knowledge workers: second-generation effects of India's brain drain (Sage, 1999) and several research papers published by the ILO, the OECD, IRD-France, Institute of Developing Economies-Japan External Trade Organisation (IDE-JETRO) and the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM). He is a member of the editorial boards of several international journals. With the India Migration Report 2009: Past, Present and the Future Outlook, he launched the IMR series, followed by India Migration Report 2010-2011: The Americas, published in 2012 by Cambridge University Press, New York.

Christiane Kuptsch is Senior Specialist in Migration Policy at the International Labour Office (ILO) in Geneva, Switzerland. Before taking up this position, she was Senior Research Officer at the ILO's International Institute for Labour Studies; she also worked for the ILO-linked International Social Security Association. She is a Political Science graduate of the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva, and she also studied law at the University of Hamburg in Germany. Her publications include articles on the migration of students and trainees, the protection of migrant workers, temporary foreign-worker programmes, and the effects of the economic crisis on migration policies and she has also edited books on migrant recruitment agents, the increasing competition for global talent, and the internationalization of labour markets. She is the co-author of Managing Labour Migration in the Twenty-First Century (Yale University Press, 2006).