While India’s young doctors struggle under the weight of Bond Service and lack of recruitment despite genuine passion to serve in government hospitals—our media and society continue to glorify IITians who leave the country to build Billion-dollar empires for America.
We’ve created a culture where no highly skilled professional feels motivated to stay back and build Indian tech giants. Exception might exist but number is very few.
As a result, mediocrity dominates our Indian startup ecosystem, often masking and utilizing mass unemployment under the glamor of “quick commerce” (QComm) — which, in truth, adds little long-term value.
Again and again, the US reminds us of how fragile Indians are in their business framework. Sure, we celebrate Pichai and Nadella, but they’re American citizens now, leading American companies.
We’ve devalued countless Indian professionals who silently power the economy here, building good business staying in India while over-hyping exported talent that adds minimal direct value to India’s growth.
India produces the world’s second-largest pool of STEM graduates, churning out 1.5 million engineers and over 80,000 doctors annually Despite this, India has no homegrown global tech product at the scale of a Google, Facebook, Microsoft in USA or Tencent, WeChat like in China
Instead, we export our brightest minds to Silicon Valley — where they power the growth of American Big Tech, while India continues to lag behind in creating a global digital ecosystem of it’s own.
Let’s talk numbers :
Remittance can never never be a contribution in Nation Building. India has failed to nurture its talent. Exporting brains for high-dollar salaries may look good on paper, but it does nothing for nation-building.
- Over 4.5 million Indian professionals work in the U.S. tech and research industries (Source: Migration Policy Institute)
- India ranks #1 in sending skilled immigrants to the US under H1-B visa program — accounting for ~74% of all H1-B visas in 2024
- Over 25% of all tech-based startups in the US have at least one Indian-origin founder, yet the intellectual property, profits, and innovation benefit the US, not India
Meanwhile, India’s own digital sovereignty is under threat : 95% of India’s data is stored or processed on foreign cloud infrastructure (Source: Ministry of Electronics & IT, 2023)
Apps used by over 90% of Indians daily— WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube — are American-owned.As a result our data is in Hand of American Companies.
India lacks indigenous social media or messaging giants with global reach — unlike China, which successfully built :
WeChat (messaging, payments, social media)
Baidu (search engine)
Weibo (social network)
Alibaba
Tencent ( e-commerce & entertainment )
This didn’t happen by accident. China invested heavily in building its own digital infrastructure, funded its entrepreneurs, protected its market, and created IP ownership at home.
Until we start investing in our own minds, protecting our data, and nurturing indigenous innovation, India will continue to be the office of the world, we’ll always be building someone else’s Business and we won’t have our own tech giant, while the front offices — the decision-makers and IP holders — sit in California.
