Google Names Indian-American Sundar Pichai as its New CEO

[Riaz Haq]

Silicon Valley tech giant Google has named Indian-born IIT-educated Sundar Pichai to head its search, ads, maps, Play Store, YouTube, and Android businesses as part of a major reorganization announced by the company. Current Google CEOs Larry Page and Sergei Brin have kicked themselves upstairs to lead Alphabet, a new holding company which will include Google as well as affiliated companies like the life-extension project Calico and a drone delivery venture called Wing, according to media reports.

FOBs and ABCDs:

Pichai and other Indian-born individuals in Silicon Valley are often referred to as "FOBs" (Fresh Off the Boat) by American-born Indians. FOBs return the "affection" by calling American-born Indians "ABCDs" (American Born Confused Desis). For those unfamiliar with the Indian vernacular, Pichai's first name Sundar means beautiful. All joking aside, it's a matter of great pride and joy to Indians and other immigrants for one of their own to be picked to head an iconic Silicon Valley tech giant.

Google Revenue Growth Slowing

Google Revenue Growth:

While Google continues to generate billions of dollars in cash, its revenue growth is clearly slowing. Google's revenue growth has halved in a year-- from 22% annual growth in Q2/2014 to 11% in Q2/2015. The trend is clear: High growth can not be sustained as new social media competitors like Facebook and Twitter grow to target the same ad market.

Boston Consulting Group's Market Share vs Growth Matrix

Cash Cow Management:

It seems that Google founders Brin and Page have decided to delegate the tending of the cash cow called Google to Pichai.  This will free up the founding duo to focus on investing in new ideas to grow other large high-growth tech businesses in the future as Google's ad revenue growth continues to decline. It's a well-known concept first documented by Boston Consulting Group in a matrix with four quadrants: Stars, Dogs, Cash Cows and Question Marks.

Difficult Transition:

Other high-growth tech companies have found this transition from a cash-cow to new high-growth products very difficult. Apple did well with the PC business but almost failed with its decline until Steve Jobs returned with iPod, iPhone and Tablets to reclaim its high-growth trajectory.  Intel and Microsoft continue to struggle since the growth of Wintel PCs flattened. It will be a big test for Google founders to manage this major transition.

Summary:

Major reorganization announced by Google today is a recognition of the difficult transition its founders face. With all its talent, Google probably has as good a chance as any tech company to meet this challenge head-on. Brin and Page must continue to focus on hiring and retaining the top talent to pull it off.

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[Riaz Haq]

A third of India's most sought after engineering graduates leave the country

https://qz.com/a-third-of-indias-iit-graduates-leave-the-country-18...

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31308/w31308.pdf

Banaras Hindu University saw a 540% spike in immigration among graduates after it was turned as an IIT in 2012

One-third of those graduating from the country’s prestigious engineering schools, particularly the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), migrate abroad.

Such highly-skilled persons account for 65% of the migrants heading to the US alone, a working paper (pdf) of the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has concluded.


Nine out of 10 top scorers in the annual joint entrance examination held nationally for admission to the IITs and other reputed engineering colleges have migrated. Up to 36% of the top 1,000 scorers, too, have taken this path, according to the paper published this month.

In the US, there is a long list of IIT graduates now leading executives and CEOs. However, most immigrants move to the US as students and eventually join the US workforce. The NBER paper found that 83% of such immigrants pursue a Master’s degree or a doctorate.

“...through a combination of signaling and network effects, elite universities in source countries play a key role in shaping migration outcomes, both in terms of the overall propensity and the particular migration destination,” the report said.

India has 23 IITs across the country. The acceptance rates at most these hallowed institutions are lower than those of Ivy League colleges, especially at the most sought-after IITs at Kharagpur, Mumbai, Kanpur, Chennai, and Delhi. In 2023 alone, 189,744 candidates registered for the JEE, competing for only 16,598 seats.

Global economies are keen on highly skilled Indians
The US graduate program is a key pathway for migration, to recruit the “best and brightest,” the NBER report said.

Similarly, the UK’s High Potential Individual visa route lets graduates from the world’s top 50 non-UK universities, including the IITs, stay and work in the country for at least two years. For doctoral qualification, the work visa is for at least three years.

Fresh IIT graduates looking to move abroad are helped by a network of successful alumni and faculty already settled abroad, the report said. Some even provide access to particular programs where they have influence over admissions or hiring decisions.


The interesting case of Banaras Hindu University

In 2012, the century-old Banaras Hindu University (BHU), also India’s first central university, was accorded IIT status. The institute located in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, was elevated without any changes to its staff, curriculum, or admission system.

The NBER report studied 1,956 BHU students who graduated between 2005-2015 with a BTech, BPharm, MTech, or integrated dual degrees. It found a 540% increase in the probability of migration among graduates after the grant of the IIT status.

“...the quality of education/human capital acquired by the students in the cohorts before and after the change remained constant, while only the name of the university on the degree received differed,” the report said.

[Riaz Haq]

TOP TALENT, ELITE COLLEGES, AND MIGRATION:
EVIDENCE FROM THE INDIAN INSTITUTES OF TECHNOLOGY
Prithwiraj Choudhury
Ina Ganguli
Patrick Gaulé


https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31308/w31308.pdf


We study migration in the right tail of the talent distribution using a novel dataset of Indian high
school students taking the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), a college entrance exam used for
admission to the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). We find a high incidence of
migration after students complete college: among the top 1,000 scorers on the exam, 36% have
migrated abroad, rising to 62%for the top 100 scorers. We next document that students who
attended the original “Top 5” Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) were 5 percentage points
more likely to migrate for graduate school compared to equally talented students who studied in
other institutions. We explore two mechanisms for these patterns: signaling, for which we study
migration after one university suddenly gained the IIT designation; and alumni networks, using
information on the location of IIT alumni in U.S. computer science departments.

------


Highly skilled immigrants make important contributions to innovation and technology in
the United States. Often, they study in elite universities in their home countries before getting
advanced degrees abroad. For example, many successful Indian immigrants in the technology
industry—including Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet Inc./Google, and Arvind Krishna, the
CEO of IBM—are undergraduate alumni of the selective Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).
Similarly, Chinese students in U.S. Ph.D. programs overwhelmingly come from a set of highly
selective Chinese universities (Gaulé and Piacentini, 2013).
In this paper, we study migration in the very right tail of the talent distribution for high
school students in India, focusing on the extent to which elite universities in their home country
facilitate migration. We focus on the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). The IITs are
prestigious and highly selective technical universities with lower acceptance rates than Ivy League
colleges, particularly for the original five IIT Campuses.
1 Admission to the IITs is solely through
the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), where nearly one million exam takers compete for less than ten
thousand spots. Desai, Kapur, McHale, and Rogers (2009) document anecdotal evidence related
to the role of elite institutions in India, such as the IITs and the All India Institute of Medical
Sciences, in facilitating skilled migration to the United States. IIT students have even been
described as “America’s most valuable import from India” (Leung, 2003).
Emigration is often difficult to observe from administrative datasets, and few surveys have
been conducted with a focus on top talent that are not selected on future success or mobility.
2 We
were able to overcome these challenges by leveraging the unanticipated public release of the names
and scores of JEE exam takers in 2010, combined with an intensive manual collection effort on
exam takers’ outcomes. The result is a novel dataset of high school students who took the JEE
exam, linked to college attended and later career, education, and migration outcomes. The data
provides individuals’ scores received on the exam and their national ranking. An important feature

[Riaz Haq]

Why #Indians don't want to be Indian #citizens anymore? More than 1.6 million Indians have renounced their Indian citizenship since 2011, including a whopping 225,620 in 2022 alone, averaging around 618 per day. #Modi #BJP #Hindutva
#chaos #anarchy
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/migrate/why-indians-dont-w...

"The principal reason why people migrate is economic well being. Everyone wants a better life and their hope is that they would find it in another country," Amit Dasgupta, former Consul-General of India in Sydney, told IANS.

"In sociology, this is referred to as 'the push factor'. You are pushed out to a place which offers better prospects," Dasgupta said.Many Indian students who go for higher studies abroad also end up settling there as these countries provide them better jobs with attractive pay scales.According to the latest Education Ministry data, more than 770,000 Indian students went abroad to study in 2022 -- a six-year high.

Also, many Indian students find it tough to find jobs after returning home, which is why they apply for permanent residency in their country of study.

More than 90 per cent of the students do not wish to come back to India, say estimates.When it comes to India's rich, they want to swim in foreign waters to diversify their fortune, set up alternative residencies, conduct business and pursue a better quality of life even though India continues to be an attractive environment for business activity and corporate growth.

A 2020 Global Wealth Migration Review report said that among many reasons why people make the decision to migrate to other countries is safety of women and children, lifestyle factors like climate and pollution, financial concerns including taxes, better healthcare for families and educational opportunities for children, and to escape oppressive governments.A low passport score of a country can also make individuals emigrate.

A higher passport index ranking ensures one gets better access to travel visa-free to many countries.The Indian passport registered the largest global fall in the Passport Index 2023 -- ranking at 144th position this year with a mobility score of 70.

This means Indians can travel to 21 countries visa-free, and need a visa for 128 countries.In contrast, a Greece or Portugal residency card provides Indians visa-free travel across all Schengen countries.