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Why Sridhar Vembu’s ‘return home’ appeal to Indians in the US is significant

Sooner or later, people of Indian origin, including Green Card holders, US passport holders, and Indian passport-holding NRIs, may find themselves drawn back toward India.

Sridhar Vembu, promoter and former CEO of the globally renowned software company ‘Zoho’, recently sparked a new debate by writing an open letter to Indians residing in the US, appealing to them to ‘return home and contribute to India’s future’. The central premise of his appeal is that India’s standing in the world depends upon its technological advancement. 

For a long time, India has been exporting its talent to the rest of the world—a phenomenon commonly referred to as the “brain drain.” During that period, India lagged in creating world-class technology. Today, though, India possesses the capability to forge ahead in the development of world-class technology; the primary prerequisite for achieving this expeditiously is that the Indians currently settled abroad—who had originally left the country due to a lack of opportunities—must return home.

Prominent figures have, on numerous occasions, appealed to Indians to return home. However, none of these appeals sparked a debate as intense as the one triggered by the call of Vembu, a staunch advocate for self-reliance in technology (particularly in IT and Artificial Intelligence). The reason for this is that US President Donald Trump has been making various disparaging remarks regarding people of Indian origin. 

For quite some time now, he has consistently asserted that employment opportunities for Americans are diminishing due to the presence of foreigners. He has repeatedly argued that companies utilise H-1B visa provisions to import cheap labour from abroad, thereby displacing American workers. Consequently, he has tightened H-1B visa regulations and initiated rigorous scrutiny of foreign workers. 

Whimsical Donald Trump

The vast majority of Indians working in the US, primarily in the software and technology........

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