What India can learn from China to retain talent or reverse brain drain

Indian H-1B visa aspirants need not despair at the fee hike to $100,000. New avenues are opening up, though not from the US.

On August 14, China notified the addition of K visa to its list inviting “young foreign scientific and technological talents” from around the world. To be open from October 1, this would allow talented youngsters in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) to study or work in China without prior sponsorship, job or research offers with incentives that would be spelt out later.

Also read: India’s startup moment is now: Kumar Vembu on innovation and brain drain

Soon South Korea may also launch its own version of the H-1B visa to attract foreign talents. Last Monday, a senior government official said ministries had been asked to find ways to exploit the US changes to attract scientists and engineers from abroad.

China’s K visa to acquire foreign talents

The Chinese K visa, however, is not in response to the US’s move – which came much later on September 17.

China has been reversing brain drain since the 1980s, bringing back primarily the expatriates in the US – scientists, academics and entrepreneurs – with several incentives. Its last big push came in December 2007 with an official pronouncement that attracting China’s overseas talent was “absolutely necessary” if it wished “to raise its global competitiveness” and become “an innovative society.”

Thus, the new K visa is in addition to its many such visas: R visa for foreign high-level talents and urgently needed specialised talents, X1 visa for long-term study, X2 visa for short-term study and Z visa for working in China.

Also read: Why Trump's tough stance on trade and visas puts Modi govt in a bind

The December 2007 initiative led to its much studied and envied Thousand Talents Plan (TTP), which asked expatriates who could make breakthroughs in key technologies, emerging fields and serve as scientific and technological leaders to return.

It brought in a large number of young talented Chinese back. Although various studies look at their performance vis-à-vis cohorts in the US from the scientific research papers published and found mixed results, there is no disputing that it added to China’s other initiatives to strengthen research and development (R&D) – eventually leading to China becoming a tech-manufacturing-and-exports hub.

It also caused a scare in the US just as the Made in China 2025 did.

The Federal had earlier explained why and how it spooked the US and listed the strategic lessons India could learn – as against the failures of Make in India of 2014 to ramp up manufacturing or exports, along with the NITI Aayog’s list of such lessons in the R&D. In fact, despite the Make in India mission, manufacturing and exports have declined, it made no difference to R&D.

Also read: After fee hike, US proposes new H-1B visa selection system

The TPP also needs India’s attention because there aren’t many takers for the argument that the US visa hurdle would benefit India by automatically retaining talents. That may not happen on its own and Indian talent may fly away to Canada, Australia, Singapore, Europe and even West Asian countries instead.

Unlike India, these countries have built ecosystems to attract and nurture foreign talents. Other than occasional idle talk, India has not taken any meaningful initiative to either reverse brain drain or attract foreign talents.

China’s Thousand Talents Plan to reverse brain drain

One of the most comprehensive studies on the TPP was by the Washington-based think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), published in May 2020. As of 2018, it said, the TPP had “over 7,000 participants”, many of them were with PhDs in artificial intelligence (AI) related fields – although their return rate was “under 10 per cent”.

The success of the TPP, launched in 2008, is underlined by the very purpose of this study: Assess the damage it caused to the US research and development work.

Also read: India to urge US to ease H-1B visa curbs during trade talks: Report

It pointed to two particularly troubling elements of the TPP for the US:

(a) In 2010, the TPP created a “part time” (PT) plan to allow Chinese to have simultaneous appointments abroad and in China. These were engaged in collaborative research in China and involved “some technology transfer, triggering concerns among US government officials”.

(b) Its “Foreign Thousand Talents Plan”, through which China hired senior American researchers “sometimes in secret who transfer the product of their own research to China”. Although not necessarily illegal, it transferred intellectual property (IP) created with US taxpayer funds to China for which American researchers received “handsome rewards”.

The mitigation it suggested was: China should make the TTP more transparent, the US should be more transparent about “its investigations” into the fallouts and the two sides should carry out “extensive dialogue” to protect collaborative research and publishing.

A 2024 study on how international student returnees contribute to the development of their home countries said, China (28.8 per cent) was next only to the US (32.7 per cent) in producing research papers, the UK was third (19.2 per cent).

Also read: How China secured its place as global manufacturing and exports hub

Before looking at the strategic lessons the TPP provides for India, here is a point to ponder.

A 2022 study by Georgetown University (“The long-term stay rates of international STEM PhD graduates”) said, Chinese and Indian nationals accounted for nearly half of all international STEM PhD graduates in the US and most stayed long after graduation.

“In February 2017, approximately 90 per cent of Chinese nationals and 87 per cent of Indian nationals who completed STEM PhD programs in the United States between 2000 and 2015 were still living in the country, compared to 66 per cent of graduates from other countries”, it concluded.

It also said, “due to country caps on green cards, Indian graduates have more difficulty obtaining permanent residency than other international students”.

Strategic lessons from TPP

The CSIS and other literature on the subject throw light on the strategies China adopted to reverse brain drain.

1. The TPP was created by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), providing an organisational set up to launch, direct and monitor the operation.

2. The CPP asked local government (municipal) bodies to determine the types of talents they need, recruit and provide incentives (research grants, tax breaks, housing subsidies etc.). Local bodies established their own TPPs and encouraged local universities to help in identifying and bringing talent. Following this, urban local bodies sent out teams “across the globe” to acquire those talents. Universities who helped in bringing in talents received generous financial incentives (about $1.7 million).

3. But before acquiring talent, rigorous assessment was made. Local and foreign experts from related fields made anonymous assessments, followed by comprehensive appraisals by a committee of international experts in the relevant field.

4. Later, three new elements were added: (i) Young Thousand Talents Program (YTTP) for under-40 scholars (ii) Part Time (PT) Programme and (iii) Foreign Thousand Talents Plan (FTTP).

5. There wasn’t just one TPP but over 200 of those at various levels – 43 at national and over 200 at sub-national levels. The number of such plans is growing and shifting constantly as China “seeks to retain, manage, and recruit talent globally”.

India way of doing things

That the Indian education system is not of top global standards or adequate to provide quality higher education is no secret. Unlike China, Indian higher education institutions don’t figure in the global top 200.

That is why the number of students going abroad for higher studies has shot up. According to a Lok Saha reply of August 18, 2025 , their numbers jumped from 4.5 lakh in 2021 to 7.5 lakh in 2022 and 8.9 lakh in 2023, before coming down to 7.6 lakh in 2024.

What has the education department done to check or reduce brain drain?

On the face of it, there are initiatives like allowing foreign universities to open campus, funds for upgrading labs and research institutions, improve other infrastructure, research fellowship to pursue PhD, building world class institutions etc. These moves are superficial with no attempt to measure if any tangible gains have been made.

Take the case of building world-class institutions.

In 2017, the Centre announced awarding “Institute of Eminence” (IOE) to a select few and give complete autonomy to become institutions of excellence. It ended up awarding this status to a non-existing private institution and justified it by saying this was under the “greenfield category”.

An investigating report of 2023 revealed that most of the private IOEs given to private institutions were struggling because of bureaucratic hurdles. These hurdles ranged from multiplicity of regulatory bodies working at cross purposes and delaying projects to government interference in academic and administrative matters, slow process and short-term grant of visas to foreign faculty etc.

As a face saver, the IOE plan eventually listed a large number of well-established public institutions set up in the 1950s and 1960s.

Increasingly, the ascent is on promoting traditional knowledge in education, health and research over modern and scientific. Hindi is promoted as the medium of instruction for modern engineering and medical courses – despite knowing that Hindi doesn’t have the vocabulary, let alone contributions to scientific developments to justify.