Do as I did, come back home, Manmohan Singh tells Indian diaspora

On his first visit to India’s commercial capital after a series of corruption scandals tarnished his government’s image, prime minister Manmohan Singh made an impassioned appeal to Indians abroad to return home to participate in India’s progress.

While calling out to Indian intellectuals abroad, Singh recalled his own decision to quit his job at the United Nations (UN) to and return home to teach at the Delhi School of Economics.

Between 1966 and 1969, Singh worked at the UN Secretariat in New York as the economic affairs officer and later as the chief of financing for the Trade Section at the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). From 1969 to 1971, he taught international trade at the University of Delhi’s School of Economics.

The prime minister was addressing the audience after giving away the prestigious Infosys awards to six scientists for path-breaking research in the field engineering and computer science, mathematics, physical sciences, life sciences and social sciences.

The award, which carries a prize of Rs50lakh each, is positioned as India’s equivalent of the much coveted Nobel Prize.

Singh lauded the awards, instituted by Infosys Science Foundation, a part of India’s second largest software services exporter Infosys Technologies Ltd, as they recognise Indian scientists working in India, especially considering that CV Raman was the last Indian scientist working in India to win a Nobel Prize in sciences.

Interestingly, professor Amartya Sen, a jury member for the awards, who won Nobel Prize for economics in 1998, was sharing the stage with Singh.

Even as he made an earnest effort to reach out to Indian abroad, Singh acknowledged the apprehension when it comes to leaving well-funded institutions abroad. “Many young people may think it is not exactly wise to leave the comfort of well funded institutions abroad to return home to work in India,” the prime minister said.

But he illustrated an example from his own life. When he quit his job at UNCTAD, the then head of that organisation and well-known Argentinean economist, Prof Raul Prebisch, told Singh that he was “being foolish” by leaving an UN job to return to teaching in India.

“But sometimes in life it is wise to be foolish,” Singh said, much to the delight of an audience packed with scientists, professors and businessmen.

“Having accepted all the inadequacies of India’s research infrastructure, if there are young men and women who are willing to work here and produce world class research despite all the constraints they may face, we must salute their wisdom, their grit and determination, and their love for their country,” Singh said.

The prime minister, who is in the city on a two-day visit, said that his government is working on removing barriers to acquiring knowledge and cited increasing government focus on instituting more scholarships to fund education. In particular, he cited the right to education as a special achievement. “If there is one initiative that our government has taken in these six-and-a-half years that I consider really special, it is the enactment of the Right to Education Act,” Singh said.

He also cautioned that the “growing share of privately funded for-profit educational intuitions” is emerging as a “worrisome barrier to freer access to knowledge”.