When my parents emigrated from India in the 1960s, they sought what might be called the ‘-British dream’: stability, opportunity and the chance of a better life in the world’s third-largest economy. So when I told my parents that I was moving to India for the same sort of reasons, they were shocked. India may be going up in the world, but what about the corruption, bureaucracy, pollution and overcrowding? Would I really earn enough money and live in a nice house? It made no sense at all to them that, aged 32, their daughter had chosen to go east — and join a steady exodus which is passing almost entirely unnoticed.
Immigration has dominated the British debate so much that there has been little discussion about the opposite trend: that each day, about 1,000 people pack their bags and leave. That any Brit might leave for Mumbai seems strange even to Indians of my parents’ generation. India has, to be sure, huge problems and is home to a third of the world’s undernourished children. But this image of a poor country, which my classmates at my old Aylesbury school would describe as ‘backward’, obscures another image very clear to my generation. This is of India as an emerging superpower with a booming economy. A land of great opportunity for anyone with a decent education, a cultural understanding of the West and a grasp of Hindi.
Our elders may not understand it but the equation makes perfect sense: why stay in Britain, with its massive youth and graduate unemployment, when in India jobs and business opportunities abound? The top rate of tax is 30 per cent, and freelance contractors are charged just 10 per cent. India’s definition of an economic slowdown is growth of merely 5.5 per cent — which is still ten times faster than the growth of the British economy.
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