India’s intellectuals, wealthy, and middle class are migrating in their numbers to the United States and Europe. In addition, some have chosen to go to Eastern Europe, the former Soviet republics, particularly Russia. Some are moving to lesser-developed regions such as Africa. According to a recent review report, widely circulated in the foreign media, Sanjaya Baru—the book author and distinguished Fellow of the United Service Institution of India—says talented Indians are migrating abroad in record numbers.
Over 23,000 millionaires have left the country in the last decade, says Sanjaya Baru. In his latest book, Secession of the Successful: The Flight out of New India, he explains the various phases of organized migration and further examines the reasons behind the current exodus.
In an interview published in August 2025, Baru talks about how the exodus has been normalized, the political and economic factors driving it, and what it means for a country that hopes to be a developed economy by 2047. India’s elite aren’t just leaving physically; they are slowly pulling away from the idea of India itself. The brain drain, or the export of human capital, drew attention 40 to 50 years ago when economists like Jagdish Bhagwati wrote about it. But in the last quarter century, no one has been paying attention.
The rich are also leaving Brazil, South Africa, and Turkey. Some countries don’t even pay particular attention. But as an Indian concerned about the economy, I’m worried that more and more talented Indians are leaving. Brain drain and wealth drain are rising. But despite the rise in the drain of knowledge and now wealth, there’s hardly any attempt to quantify the impact of it.
Migration has been there, mentioned in the book. Migration has been a natural phenomenon for centuries, right from the beginning, and people have moved all over the world. Sanjaya Baru looks at it as a phenomenon of fairly large-scale migration, with literally thousands and thousands of people migrating. And in the case of India, this kind of large-scale migration happened in three phases.
The first phase was during the British rule, when, from around the middle of the 19th century till the first quarter of the 20th century, large numbers of Indians were taken as indentured labor to various colonies of the British Empire. In fact, millions of Indians went to places ranging from Fiji in the Pacific and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean to Trinidad and Tobago and Suriname, and they constitute what we call the persons of Indian origin. This is about 20 million people around the world.
But in the middle of the 70s, after the oil crisis, when the Gulf boom and huge construction work started across the Gulf, large numbers of Indians went in search of work. Of course, Hyderabad (where this interview happened) was one of the places from which they went. Kerala and Karnataka also saw large numbers of people going, literally again millions, and now we have about 8 million Indians living in the Gulf region. So, this is the second wave of essentially skilled or unskilled workers migrating.
Around the same time in the 70s, we saw a process by which middle-class professionals, doctors, and engineers started migrating. That was facilitated initially by the decision of the United States to liberalize their immigration policy because they needed these doctors and engineers, and they looked at India as a source. But that process skyrocketed after 1999, when you had the Y2K problem with the computer systems around the world having to switch from 1999 to 2000, and India had lots of trained computer software guys and engineers.
So, companies like Infosys, Wipro, and TCS all came up responding to this demand. That was another wave, and now we have literally again millions of Indians working in this space across the English-speaking world. Mostly the United States, but also other countries. What is now recorded in this book particularly is what has been seen happening essentially over the last 10 years with Indians beginning to migrate. According to one study, 23,000 millionaires have migrated in the last 10 years, and more and more countries are selling their citizenship. They are offering golden visas, they are offering permanent residence, and Indians are taking advantage of that.
Sanjaya Baru referred to the fourth phase as the changing class composition of emigration from India. The decade is essentially middle-class professionals working in a range of professions migrating, mainly doctors and engineers but also those in the field of finance and in sciences, so across different professions. The emigration of the wealthy is a recent phenomenon.
The Indian economy recorded the highest rates of growth from 2003 to 2012. During those nine years, we saw eight percent growth—during the last year of Prime Minister Vajpayee’s tenure and the first term of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. It had eight to nine percent growth for almost a decade—those were the boom years.
That process generated a lot of wealth, and that wealth generation went on for some more time, even till the Covid-19 pandemic. A large number of Indians made a substantial amount of money, and that is how the top five percent of the population has become richer. And when we talk about inequality, the widening gap between the bottom 50 percent and the top five percent, that is a recent phenomenon.
There have been concerns that growth has been pretty subdued in the past decade. If a greater and greater number of millionaires are moving out, the number of the rich should also reduce. But the number of rich is only rising. Millionaires moving out—this is a phenomenon seen in India. It’s a phenomenon we see in many countries, particularly for a long time in China, where literally thousands of millionaires emerged because of the high rates of economic growth, and many of them moved out to Singapore, they moved out to the United States, and they moved out to Europe. So, there was a movement of the Chinese millionaires. We saw that in Russia too. But when millionaires from China and Russia were moving out, the Western media would say these are not free societies. So, once you have money, people want to leave.
India is supposed to be a free society, and yet once people make a lot of money, they want to leave. So, it’s true, it’s not a phenomenon confined to India, but certainly it’s a new phenomenon in India and is worth understanding, as Sanjaya Baru wrote in his book—the migration of the brainy people, or the talented. It’s the brain drain, and it’s both the challenge of brain drain and wealth drain. Given that this book is about the Indian elite, middle-class professionals, the wealthy, and the Indian diaspora overseas.
