AS WEST SHIVERS, A RELATIVELY SHIELDED INDIA IS ATTRACTING NRIs

You don’t leave Goldman Sachs easily, says Sidharth Punshi, as he recalls wrestling with the idea of returning to India after spending nearly half his life abroad. Earlier this year, when Punshi (34), was weighing his options, Goldman Sachs was a mighty investment bank and he was based in London as its executive director and head of the investment banking unit focusing on the European IT services and the software sector. Today, Goldman Sachs is no longer an investment bank and Punshi is no longer in Europe’s financial capital but in India, as the managing director of Goldman’s smaller rival Jeffries.

As the US and Europe struggle with convulsions in the financial markets and slip into recession, a relatively unscathed India — projected to grow by 7-8% this fiscal — is being rediscovered as the new land of opportunity by thousands such as Punshi. Nearly two million jobs have been lost in the US so far this year and financial firms worldwide are estimated to have shed two lakh jobs, bulk of them in the developed world. In West Asia, where many Indians work in the construction sector, the sharp fall in crude oil prices has brought the real estate boom in the region to a grinding halt, says Ajit Isaac, former CEO of staffing services provider Adecco India. Thousands of expatriate Indians in the Gulf are desperate to return. Many of them have young children and want their kids to grow up here,” he says.

In India, even the export-reliant tech sector is projected to add some two lakh jobs between April 2008 and March 2009, while government-run banks are expected to add more than 1 lakh jobs in the next two years.

“There are more opportunities in India than abroad. If the right opportunity is not there in banking, there are other sectors.

Consequences Bigger This Time

“BESIDES, India is a lot more entrepreneurial now,” says Punshi.

While the bursting of the ‘dotcom bubble’ in 2000-01 saw technology professionals of Indian origin head back home in droves, the slump triggered by the bursting of the US realestate bubble is seen having more farreaching consequences. “This time, the severity of the downturn is causing people to make a permanent move back to India,” observes Anu Parthasarathy, CEO of Californiabased international recruitment services provider Global Executive Talent.

The financial sector may be the worst affected, but Parthasarathy is of the view that the job market for those employed in the sector is not so bad because prospects are global. This is certainly true of Punshi, a graduate of the London School of Economics who spent 16 years overseas. He worked in New York, Hong Kong and Singapore before he left London to settle in Mumbai in May this year with his journalist wife Mallika Kapur and one-and-a-half-year-old son Rahil. Like for many others, personal factors, especially the future of his son, weighed heavily in his decision: he wanted Rahil to have the best opportunities, grow up in an Indian environment and have the support of his grandparents — all made possible by returning. An expatriate Indian employee of Citigroup in New York who did not want to reveal his real name and preferred to be identified as Ranbir Singh for this story says he and many others like him are looking for work in India through friends and job portals. Singh, who is in his thirties and has been interviewed for a job by a private insurer in India, says salary is not his top priority. “It is not the best of times to negotiate on salaries. It’s more important to get a good job profile and some stability.”

Retired people, too, are fleeing the developed world as their savings, mostly invested in stock markets, go up in smoke. Chandan Banerjee, a retired automobile engineer who lived for 30 years in Germany, returned to Kolkata with his German wife a few days ago. “With stock markets collapsing, we lost a major part of our money. We had to sell our house in Germany and return. The stock market here is also volatile, but there are other financial instruments which offer higher returns,” says Banerjee.


Source: The Economic Times