September 29th, 2007 
Deepak WILL CORPORATE INDIA GO GLOBAL? The intense competition unfolding in India today has ensured the rise of several world-class and soon-to-be-world-class companies. Entrepreneurial ferment is in the air. Yet, there is an under utilised asset that corporate India should recognize-the Indian diaspora. China has shown the way forward. Its worldwide diaspora numbers about 50 million, compared to India’s approximately 20 million. Wire money online to India with Xoom.com for as low as $4.99. Over the last two and half decades, the Chinese government has successfully tapped into the financial, managerial, knowledge and social networks of the overseas Chinese. This has resulted in mutual gain. In the early 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping’s China first opened up, only Chinese entrepreneurs overseas could compensate for the murkiness of the Chinese corporate environment and chose to invest. During the late 1980s, 70 per cent of foreign direct investment into China came, from this community, especially from the ethnically Chinese locales of Taiwan and the then British colony of Hong Kong. Their catalytic function thus served; today China is a central part of most major corporate boardrooms’ investment maps. In recent years, the US Census Bureau has reported about one million India-born residents in the US, as compared to 1.5 million China born residents. The Chinese community in the US is larger mostly because migration from China to the US began as early as the 1840s; migration from India followed about a century later. But, importantly, migration from India hit its stride in the 1960s and thereafter-precisely when Mao’s China had curtailed migration-so that more Indians than Chinese have found their professional ways into American corner offices and boardrooms today. Indians have thus steadily and very visibly reached upper executive echelons. Silicon Valley venture capitalists and entrepreneurs of Indian origin, responsible for putting the Indian diaspora on the radar, were once senior executives technology firms. Success has not been limited to information technology, but has spanned sectors like consumer products and aviation. And the Indian community as a whole is wealthy- surveys by the likes of Merrill Lynch point to two hundred thousands millionaire families and median income for people of Indian origin of $60,093 compared to the US median income of $38,885. Encouragingly, the government has made strides in acknowledging the value of the Indian diaspora. The high-profile Pravasi Bharatiya Divas is now in its fourth year and the India Resurgent Bonds scheme of [...]
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