In a critical analysis, Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri has raised fundamental concerns about India's latest proposals to attract Indian-origin academic faculty back to the country. Writing on December 1, 2025, the Jadavpur University professor emeritus responded to a recent piece by Somak Raychaudhury published in The Indian Express on November 27.
The Flawed Foundation of Repatriation Plans
Chaudhuri acknowledges that Raychaudhury's suggestions for policy and cultural changes to facilitate the return of academics are implementable. They would, however, require significant central government investment, similar to other branded flagship projects. The core danger, according to Chaudhuri, is that such initiatives often focus solely on the flagship, ignoring the rest of the fleet. The proposed reforms would be customised for returning expatriates rather than benefiting the entire academic community.
Instead of offering returnees a robust, fully-functional academic system, the plans contemplate creating insulated mechanisms to protect them from the existing order's shortcomings. This approach is the reverse of established global systems. Western academic hubs built themselves with domestic talent first, creating an environment attractive to international scholars. China's successful model of attracting returnees is an embellishment atop a decades-long, massively funded consolidation of its entire education and research infrastructure.
India's Historic Underinvestment and Systemic Fractures
The depressing truth, Chaudhuri states, is that India has never adequately invested thought, money, or energy to develop the human resource potential of its large post-colonial population. For the first 50 years after Independence, the public university system tried but was hamstrung by poor funding and a deficient school education base. The current landscape is split between a vibrant but unregulated private sector and an increasingly weak public system, with no unifying vision.
The National Education Policy 2020 offers only general principles, with later proposals lacking focus. A targeted scheme for returnees would institutionalise a dual system, creating one set of faculty with superior funding and freedoms, and another without. This would fracture university management with two sets of financial and service rules, leading to bureaucratic chaos or arbitrary governance.
Critical Barriers: Free Speech, Bureaucracy, and Hierarchy
Chaudhuri identifies several critical barriers. Restrictions on free speech and open research are tightening in India, a major deterrent for academics, especially those returning from the US. A byzantine visa regime and foreign contribution laws make international collaboration a bureaucratic ordeal.
Furthermore, such schemes collide with the entrenched hierarchy in Indian academia. A well-funded repatriation plan would likely be restricted to top-tier institutions like central universities and elite research centres, exacerbating existing inequalities. Chaudhuri also points out a fundamental flaw: in a healthy academic system, scholars choose their placements through negotiation with institutions, rather than having authorities assign them.
The professor concludes that without an inclusive vision that first fixes the foundational issues of the entire education system, even the best-intentioned 'academic ghar wapsi' schemes will not outlive their initial fanfare, much like past failed attempts to reverse the brain drain.
