A NITI Aayog report indicated that Indian students going abroad now outnumber foreign students coming to India by 25 to one — 13.6 lakh students left in 2024, against fewer than 47,000 who arrived. Separate research shows at least a third of IIT graduates migrate, and by some estimates nearly two-thirds of the highest-ranked IIT graduates leave the country. Roughly eight in ten students who go abroad for higher studies intend to settle there for good, writes former IAS officer V S Pandey.
India spends a fraction of what rival economies invest in education and research — and then watches its best minds leave to cash in that investment elsewhere.
Every February, when the Union Budget is unveiled, a familiar ritual plays out. Education and science ministries receive a hike that sounds substantial in rupee terms — this year it was a 6.5 per cent bump, taking the education outlay to Rs 1.28 lakh crore. Commentators note it is the slowest growth in four years. Officials point to new IIT seats and AI missions. And then, quietly, the numbers are filed away until the next Budget, because nobody expects the headline ratio to move: education spending will still hover close to 4 per cent of GDP, nowhere near the 6 per cent that the National Education Policy promised in 2020, and research spending will remain wedged at around 0.6 per cent of GDP, a level it has scarcely budged from in two decades.
It is worth sitting with that second number. India’s Economic Survey for 2025-26 itself admits that gross expenditure on research and development remains stuck at approximately 0.64 per cent of GDP — a fraction of the 2.5 to 5 per cent that innovation-led economies commit. South Korea spends 5.2 per cent of its GDP on R&D. The United States spends 3.6 per cent. China, which India is routinely compared with, has spent over 2 per cent every year since 2013 and more than 1 per cent every year since 2002 — a quarter-century of compounding investment that India never made. The result is visible in absolute terms too: China now outspends every other nation on research, including the US, while India’s total R&D spend of roughly $71 billion is about a tenth of China’s.
The uncomfortable part is that this is not simply a case of a poor country doing its best. India’s own Economic Survey concedes that the deeper problem is a private sector that barely shows up. Indian industry funds only around 36 per cent of the country’s research spending; in the US, China and South Korea, private enterprise contributes upward of 70 per cent. Government money is left carrying most of the weight in a country that cannot really afford to be the primary funder of its own innovation. And even where government funding exists, the Survey notes, India excels at early-stage laboratory research but stalls in the “valley of death” — the expensive, unglamorous work of turning a lab prototype into a product a factory can build and a market can buy.
The seats problem
If research funding is squeezed, so is access to the elite training that might compensate for it. This year, roughly 1.47 million students competed for the JEE, chasing barely 17,760 seats across India’s premier engineering institutions — one seat for every 83 aspirants. For every student who gets in, dozens of equally capable ones do not. It should not surprise anyone that many of the most driven among them start looking abroad before they’ve finished school.
They do not come back in comparable numbers. A NITI Aayog report released this year found that Indian students going abroad now outnumber foreign students coming to India by 25 to one — 13.6 lakh students left in 2024, against fewer than 47,000 who arrived. Separate research shows at least a third of IIT graduates migrate, and by some estimates nearly two-thirds of the highest-ranked IIT graduates leave the country. Roughly eight in ten students who go abroad for higher studies intend to settle there for good. The OECD calculates that India now accounts for 3.12 million highly educated emigrants worldwide — the largest such outflow of any nation on earth, 65 per cent of the global total. Add doctors, engineers and researchers who leave after working in India for a few years, and government estimates suggest 60,000 to 75,000 of them exit annually.
Not just about money
It would be convenient to blame this entirely on salary gaps, and they are real — a software engineer earning well in an Indian firm can multiply that pay three to five times over in Silicon Valley. But the researchers who study this exodus point to something more corrosive: a system where funding for research is so thin that scientists leave simply to find a working laboratory, where over 67 per cent of highly qualified academics say they would rather teach abroad, and where talent frequently goes unrecognised at home in a way it would not elsewhere. It has been argued, pointedly, that the Indian state does not merely tolerate this emigration — it has come to treat it as a strategic asset, a comfortable narrative that lets policymakers avoid confronting why so many capable people would rather leave.
Not quite a lost cause
None of this means India’s story is written. Despite the funding gap, Indian science has grown its publication output to third-highest in the world, from seventh as recently as 2010 — proof that ambition and ability are not the constraint. Remittances and diaspora capital continue to flow back, and Indian-origin professionals now lead some of the world’s most valuable technology companies, a network that occasionally converts into investment, mentorship or return migration. The government has also begun to respond: a Rs 1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation scheme was launched in November 2025 specifically to draw private capital into research, and schemes to entice skilled non-resident Indians home, with tax and regulatory sweeteners, are now being discussed in policy circles.
The test is whether these remain gestures or become sustained commitments. A country that trains world-class engineers, doctors and scientists at public expense, only to see them build careers — and pay taxes — in economies that spent nothing on their education, is running a peculiar kind of subsidy for its competitors. Closing that loop does not require matching South Korea’s R&D intensity overnight. It requires a credible, decade-long trajectory toward the 6 per cent education and higher R&D spending India has promised itself for years, paired with a private sector willing to fund the science it depends on, and a state genuinely interested in making India a place its best minds choose to stay in — not merely one they are occasionally persuaded to visit.
(Vijay Shankar Pandey is former Secretary Government of India)
