The World Is Pushing Indian Scientists Home. But Indian Academia Is Pushing Them Away

A young Indian researcher applied for a faculty position at an elite Indian research institute following a postdoctoral stint at Stanford University. She expected a tough fight for the spot since she was a returnee entering the ring with top talent at a top institute. But what she got instead, to her unpleasant surprise, was silence.

For six months, she waited, and heard nothing, no acknowledgement, let alone an interview schedule or a decision on appointment.

"It goes into a black hole," says a senior faculty member familiar with the case and who didn't want to be identified. "The entire process takes a lot of time, running into several months, and it's very bureaucratic," he continues. "They don't even reply to the applicant's email. And if you are not selected, you are not even told the reason why. There is opacity in the process."

In a different case involving another top-tier institute, a returnee's application was not processed, apparently due to reservation. "There are only a few general slots, and departments are fighting over them, with almost no general hires," says a highly credentialed Indian scientist who works at an elite global institute and knows both the applicant and the recruiters. "My concern is that the inability of institutions to hire the best talent will hurt India in the longer run, especially when we are moving to a knowledge economy," he says.

At a time when India is struggling with more than 50 per cent faculty vacancies in senior posts, with over 5,000 reserved-category faculty seats remaining unfilled nationwide, and winds of geopolitics, tightening visa regimes, and patriotic sentiment are pushing, or pulling as the case may be, scientists homewards, the worry is that the system may not be well-placed to absorb the returning academics.

India, thus, risks losing out on an opportunity to induct and groom talent of both kinds, those who remain within the shores and those who work overseas and return, necessary to become a science superpower.

Instead, India could use this moment to improve its research ecosystem. A shifting geopolitical climate, tightening visa regimes in the United States (US), rising national research investment ambitions under the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), and a sense of renewed national sentiment have together created a rare window for talent circulation back to India.

The Opportunity

US President Donald Trump's "America First" philosophy has always encompassed skilled labour hiring in his country.

It began as early as the Buy American and Hire American Executive Order of April 2017, which prioritised local hiring while limiting foreign worker recruitment to only "the most-skilled or highest-paid beneficiaries."

After that order, adjudication norms for skilled-worker visas tightened significantly, resulting in a sharp rise in H-1B denials and ‘requests for evidence,’ particularly affecting early-career researchers dependent on renewals. The climate of uncertainty pushed many Indian researchers to reconsider long-term US careers.

After all, Indians make up over 70 per cent of all H-1B visas, a means for US firms to hire skilled foreign workers in specialised fields for up to six years.

All these years and a whole presidential term later, in late 2025, the Trump administration is still rearranging its H-1B visa policy, most dramatically with a $100,000 fee increase announced in September 2025, looking at hiring skilled foreign workers only to the extent that they assist in knowledge transfer to local US talent.

There is now sufficient evidence and signals, with direct data absent, pointing to the increased "reverse brain drain." The Indian government's moves over the years, particularly through schemes and fellowships, have been particularly revealing. Initiatives like the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF)–Ramanujan Fellowship, Department of Biotechnology (DBT)–Ramalingaswami Re-entry Fellowship, and Department of Science and Technology (DST)–INSPIRE Faculty Fellowship have been instituted to provide easy pathways for researchers to return.

According to government figures from August 2025, about 550 researchers have returned under the Ramanujan Fellowship this decade, while over 625 individuals have made use of the DBT–Ramalingaswami Re-entry Fellowship since its launch in 2007.

Early last year, 22 Indian-origin scientists were awarded the Vaibhav (Vaishwik Bhartiya Vaigyanik) Fellowship in India to pursue collaborative research. Across two cohorts, the count stands at "about 35," as revealed by DST Secretary, Professor Abhay Karandikar to CNN-News18 in July this year.

"We have a continuous engagement with the Indian scientists who are settled abroad, and in the coming months, we are also planning to launch a few more programmes to attract Indian scientists, particularly in the current geopolitical situations where we see an opportunity of very bright minds and talents coming back to India to contribute to our vision of Viksit Bharat and also several mission-like programmes that we have launched in science and technology areas," he told the news channel.

Reports indicate the government is designing a new scheme to bring back Indian-origin researchers, with possibly dedicated grants to help them set up research laboratories and teams in India.

These moves come at a time when Europe is positioning itself as an alternative to the US. Countries like Germany and France have aggressively liberalised skilled-researcher visas, most notably, Germany's Skilled Immigration Act and France's Talent Passport. This means India is not just competing with the US to attract talent home, but also with an increasingly open European research and development (R&D) ecosystem.

The return of Indian scientists is at the very least an emerging opportunity if not already a development in full swing. This could potentially help boost India's R&D output by leaps and bounds in the years to come.

But for that to happen, the Indian academic system where these researchers will re-enter needs to mend some of its ways.

Roadblocks In Place

On Monday evening in late July 2025, professor and head of the Telugu department at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) wrapped up his work at about 6.30 pm. He exited his office building, got on his bike, and rode onto the campus road. Little did he know that two men on a motorcycle were waiting for him at a campus intersection.

The duo were wielding a steel rod. They smacked Prof C S Rama Chandra Murty's arms with the rod, first his right and then the left, leaving his hands fractured and him in pain as he dropped to the floor, crying for help. The assailants fled as some students rushed to help Prof Murty. The police got to work. Hundreds from the institute held a protest on campus next evening.

A couple of weeks later came the big reveal: police said a professor in the very same Telugu department had conspired with a former research scholar to hire a contract killer from Prayagraj to kill the head of department. This was a case of an ex-department-head seeking revenge after losing out on his leadership role following a complaint from Prof Murty.

Settling professional scores through violence perhaps represents the worst of the 'good, bad, and ugly' spectrum of Indian academia, particularly concerning its faculty: appointments, promotions, and everything in between. (Firing isn't much of a feature in Indian academia.)

But corruption in faculty recruitment covers the whole gamut of activities. It's well known that aspiring faculty members in state universities and affiliated colleges are asked to pay hefty bribes to secure permanent faculty positions, a kind of corruption facilitated by management bodies themselves, who misuse their recruitment duties.

Private colleges and universities are also known to take cover under management quotas or donation seats to seek unofficial payments for both admissions and faculty posts, undermining merit and fairness.

Notably, candidates with personal or political connections are favoured regardless of their qualifications, while underqualified or unqualified applicants make it through despite the submission of forged or inadequate documents.

The Anna University case of 'ghost faculty' and fraudulent posts highlights a situation where a small number of professors claim multiple faculty positions across institutions, inflating faculty numbers on paper and hampering genuine recruitment. Recent investigations revealed over 2,000 cases of fake faculty appointments in the 2024-25 academic year, with one individual employed by as many as 32 colleges.

And then there are exemptions or lax enforcement by bodies such as the National Medical Commission (NMC), which have reportedly enabled mass-scale fraudulent appointments to be "legitimised," promoting systemic corruption.

The impact of all this fraudulent activity is anyone's guess. It erodes academic quality, disrupts career prospects for deserving candidates, and affects overall standards of research and teaching. Genuine scholars and early-career researchers fear getting sidelined or removed altogether from the research scheme of things due to the prevalence of monetary or political influence in recruitment.

Though these barriers have long existed, they matter more now than ever: if India cannot induct its bright returning researchers now, talent may either disperse to other nations or settle in non-research domains.

Particularly Problematic: Favouritism, Nepotism

Recruitment of faculty from within one's own network, such as one's students or past and present collaborators, community, and state is an open secret and a major problem in Indian academia.

"Certain communities prefer to hire their own, and also faculty members hire their own students," says a Bachelor of Technology (BTech) graduate from an IIT now deeply engaged with higher education and research activities at several academic institutes in India. "So they don't get diverse people. They get only one kind of people, doing only one kind of particular research."

Even IITs are not immune. "What matters, honestly speaking, is which group or lobby you belong to," says a faculty member holding a professorial position at an IIT. "If you are not from these lobbies, then it's very difficult to enter or survive."

"At least the national institutes like the IITs and the IISc (Indian Institute of Science) are meant for everybody, but that’s not happening," says this researcher, who is also a visiting faculty at a premier US university, and hence quick to draw a contrast: "This is not the case in the US. Anyone who is deemed talented and capable there will come through more or less. Here, even if there are below-average and non-performing faculty, they will still survive because their friends and lobby will help them survive." Harsh words but coming from direct experience with and exposure to multiple elite academic environments.

Academia is a necessarily collaborative environment, even in theoretical disciplines. So falling outside of the dominant community, state, or research area could make things harder for the researcher. "If you are in any organisation and want to grow, you need support,” the IIT researcher says. “You can keep working but you can't excel, because you need to collaborate, you need the support of your fellow faculty members, and sometimes even your department head may not support you.”

A hostile academic environment drives researchers to switch institutes, as also such matters as divergence in research focus from colleagues. Even in grant funding, which is a key component of meaningful research in universities, some individuals or groups get preferred for reasons beyond pure merit, a noted academic tells me.

But what if a researcher is not even let in despite a great academic record? This researcher starts applying elsewhere, going lower down the chain of institutes as India loses out on a bright researcher and potentially significant research outcomes.

"On one side, we have TIFR (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research), IISc (Indian Institute of Science), and the first and second generation of IITs where everybody wants to come. But due to various issues, those who are not able to make it here try to go to the NITs (National Institutes of Technology) and eventually to colleges affiliated to state universities. Down this list, the research facilities, the grant funding, the quality of students, etc, may not be as good, and you are then unable to do quality research," the IIT professor says.

Inside The Hiring Process

"We try to keep merit front and centre," IIT Kanpur director, Prof Manindra Agrawal says. "The process of selection at IIT Kanpur, and certainly this is the case with all other old IITs, is fairly democratic."

This process at IITs typically involves faculty deliberations over multiple rounds, discussions during the seminar presentation followed by one-on-one meetings with various faculty members, before a departmental opinion is formed. Later, experts outside the institute are invited to participate in the selection process and give their opinion, which is held in high regard.

"So a lot of people look at a candidate, evaluate, and eventually, a decision is taken by a set of external experts. The process is designed to remove biases and any kind of nepotism and so on. Not to say that this process has always worked perfectly. There are times when things go wrong, but more or less, this process has been working fairly well and has been successful in identifying merit-based candidatures," Prof Agrawal assures.

While the selection process is generally watertight in the older IITs, the newer lot struggles because they are still developing and evolving their systems and processes. Insufficient expertise and experience in-house to evaluate a candidate especially proves to be a major challenge. Consequently, the departmental decision arrived at risks being suboptimal due to insufficient standards and rigour being applied through the stages.

Still, even in the newer IITs, external experts are made part of the process, as a bulwark against any potential recruitment malpractice.

But here is a revelation: a probable drop in standards from the older IITs to the newer ones. What, then, can be said about the standards followed in the regular colleges, even those ranked highly within cities and states, sprinkled generously across the length and breadth of this country?

"I will not rule it out," says Prof Agrawal, candidly, about favouritism seeping into the faculty selection process even in the top institutes. "If I imagine a scenario where there is a strong group of one community or one type of research domain in a department, they will tend to cast a strong vote or decision, and if they electorally decide that this is the candidate we prefer, then that certainly goes through. And the departmental opinion is given very high importance because eventually the faculty member has to come to the department and work there. So the view of the department is critical," he explains.

The problem, according to Professor Amitabha Bandyopadhyay of IIT Kanpur, is also cultural. "Say you respect someone a lot, like your mentor. Imagine then that you're part of the committee along with that person you respect a lot, and say that person heads the committee. Now a controversial decision is being made. What is the possibility that you will protest it? That's where meritorious recruitment goes into the ditch," says the professor, largely in reference to the central and state universities, where faculty recruitment is known to be riddled with problems.

"As Indians, we are anyway diffident towards elderly people. On the top of that, if that's my PhD guide, I would never tell him you're doing the wrong thing. So then, naturally, the wrong thing gets implemented," says Prof Bandyopadhyay, who was head of the Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering at IIT Kanpur until a couple of months ago and grew the staff strength of the institute's incubation centre when he headed it from nine to 90.

What About Reservation?

Reservation was attributed as the cause for an applicant to not be considered at a top institute in the case mentioned in the introduction to this piece. Even in popular discourse, quotas are seen as a major factor impeding meritorious recruitment in academia, where a case is often made that merit alone should matter.

"For the life of me, I can't understand why if you're hiring a fluid mechanics professor, you have to have a quota. It makes no sense," a deep tech founder and investor, who frequents the halls of academia due to his R&D focus, tells this writer. "When you're staffing scientists and when you're bringing in people for teaching and research, what is the logic for having quotas? That's a question worth raising," he says, not wanting to be named.

"The thing is, if you want to teach students, unless the teacher is the best, or nearly the best, available teacher, it's not serving the larger social good," says Prof Rajeeva Laxman Karandikar, former director and now emeritus professor of Chennai Mathematical Institute. "I am not saying that people who are recruited under reservations are not good. But they may not be even close to the best because the rules as they exist now do not allow the faculty recruitment team to pick a teacher from the top pool," the mathematician adds, noting that, in his view, reservation in faculty recruitment "has had a negative impact on the education scene in general" and should be looked at with this perspective.

Nearly half of all faculty positions in Indian institutes are reserved. Now that India is anticipating a swell of researchers having worked abroad rejoining Indian academia, will reservation-coloured recruitment pose a significant challenge?

Prof Bandyopadhyay doesn't think so. "I have received close to 600 applications this year, and I have shared it with my colleagues. Trust me, there is not a single one that you will want to desperately have in your department. The quality of talent returning is the bottom of the pack. There is no question of relaxing the criteria for him," says the biology professor who is "a full votary of reservation in academia, not in promotion but certainly in appointment."

Besides, he notes, the returnees will find a place somewhere: "Say at the biology department of IIT Kanpur, the type of faculty we will hire, the biology department of another IIT or institute will not. They may hire at a lower tier. So the researchers coming back will fit in somewhere."

While reservation is accused of impeding quality hiring, faculty posts are actually vacant in large numbers across the reserved and unreserved categories in India's academic institutes. All IITs aspire for a 1:10 faculty-student ratio. IIT Kanpur, with a student strength of close to 10,000, must have about 1,000 faculty members. But the actual count is around 600. And this is the case with nearly all of India's top universities.

A parliamentary panel report from March 2025 revealed the scale of the problem: 56 per cent of professor positions at IITs, Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), NITs, and IISERs (Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research) are vacant, while 18 per cent of assistant professor and 38 per cent of associate professor positions remain unfilled.

The problem is a lack of quality faculty across the board. "IITs keep a high threshold in terms of identifying the right set of faculty to hire. And today, we do not have faculty available in adequate numbers. That is why all of us, certainly most of us, have open positions," Prof Agrawal says, keeping his fingers crossed that the reverse migration of high-quality academics could finally help plug the faculty shortfall.

Yet, he sounds an alarm bell. While quotas are not a problem now, he believes they could prove to be a few years down the line. "Every IIT has a lot of open positions as of today. Some are meant for candidates from the reserved category, but some are also for the open category. As we continue hiring for open positions, eventually the number of open positions in the general category will become very small or zero, and then we will have this challenge," he says.

Many insiders note that while reservation pressures are real within certain contexts, particularly PhD allotment and departmental quota balancing, the larger structural failures around transparency, infrastructure, and governance cause far more damage to merit. Vacancies exist across all categories; the problem is more capacity than quota.

“Keep trying,” Prof Bandyopadhyay says about reserved faculty posts going continually unfilled. “It’s not as if the seats that go unfilled this year get lapsed next year. It’s a system of rolling applications.”

“No, not at all,” he says when asked whether reservations compromise general hiring. “We don’t even get meritorious faculty candidates. It’s a bad state of affairs.”

Lab Ecosystem And Academic Freedom

Even when quality researchers are hired, India lacks the support ecosystem necessary to enable high-impact research.

Krishnan Chakravarthy, whose core engineering work associated with the aerospace, automotive, and defence industries connects him to India’s R&D efforts, explains: "Currently, all PhD candidates have to be admitted via the reservation system. You may have an SC (Scheduled Caste) candidate who is excellent and well-suited for a project, but the available slot is for an OBC candidate. Professors are then forced to admit the OBC candidate even if a particular SC, ST (Scheduled Tribe), or general candidate is better suited for the research project and whom the professor may be more keen to hire."

This is a question of academic freedom. Any faculty would want to freely recruit from among the best talent pool available to them, regardless of the category, state, language, or any other personal attribute of the applicant.

"When they don't get that academic freedom, they are not going to enter into the IIT system," Chakravarthy says.

The challenge extends to research infrastructure. While in the West, professors typically have their own labs to pursue research, scientists in India generally often make do with generic, all-purpose labs. This would need to change. "So labs will have to be set up specific to a scientist's area of research rather than being of a generic domain or stream. You can't have the same jet engine lab in all the IITs and say, 'I'll recruit all the jet engine specialists.' Each professor will be working on a specific kind of jet propulsion, requiring a specific kind of lab setup. So these are not general-purpose labs. Each professor will design and set up their own labs. They will choose the equipment that is needed, or they will design their own equipment and experiments and go about their work," he explains.

This will need an abundance mindset in Indian research, including funding. "Setting up a typical lab would cost around Rs 10-15 crore. And then you have to run experiments, pay lab assistants and research scholars. All the raw material has to be bought; you have to buy sensors; if some fuse blows out, you have to buy a new fuse; if some sensor equipment blows out, you have to have a set of sensors handy. Or there will be funding necessary over and above what was planned. So the institute, university, or government has to be very liberal for a person who is used to being in an abundance setup in the West to think of coming back and working in an IIT," the senior engineer says.

What this means is that even if India fixes hiring, without a functioning and conducive research ecosystem, talent will either not entertain coming back or won’t stay long enough upon return.

Seize The Moment

Prof Mathukumalli Vidyasagar, distinguished professor at IIT Hyderabad, offers a counterpoint in this discourse: "There's far too much pessimism about the quality of faculty in India. In the last 15 years or so, we have managed to attract some really good people back from abroad."

Himself a returning researcher, the former Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB) national science chair came back to India in 1989 following three decades of professorial stints at universities in the US and Canada.

"The other point," he says, "is that the quality of the Indian PhDs is improving quite a lot. So, consequently, the quality of the faculty has been going up as well. Now we have to wait and see if the momentum is maintained or not."

While optimism is refreshing and welcome, India needs drastic systemic improvements to capitalise on this reverse migration opportunity.

There is a precedent of a major change in the academic awards system. For years, the system was plagued by the same corruption and favouritism issues that beset faculty recruitment, researchers tell me. Then, in September 2022, the government took drastic action: it discontinued approximately 300 science awards across various departments, including 207 of the 211 awards from the DST. The move came after a high-level review meeting that emphasised Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision to restrict awards to "really deserving" candidates and make the process more transparent.

"There was the same kind of academic corruption in the entire awards system," the IIT researcher says. "Then the current government decided we need to scrap all the awards. They scrapped them for a cooling period. Then they thought, ‘Okay now we will bring a better system.’ Which is working. Which is doing much better. So this kind of drastic reform is required."

Similar thinking could apply to faculty recruitment. Transparency mandates, requiring institutes to publish every stage of hiring decisions with timelines and reasons for rejection, could eliminate the "black hole" phenomenon.

Mandatory external reviewers, as seen in selection panels of the elite Indian institutes, for all senior appointments could reduce lobby influence. Digital verification systems, like the fingerprint validation Anna University has introduced to combat ghost faculty, could be scaled nationally.

On infrastructure, the government's ANRF could allocate dedicated "repatriation grants", not fellowships, but capital grants of Rs 15-20 crore per returning scientist to set up labs exactly as they envision them, with freedom over equipment choices and hiring. This would signal that India is serious about not just inviting scientists back, but enabling them to do their best work. Media reports say the government is indeed mulling “setup grants” in their new re-entry schemes so that returning researchers have the funds necessary to set up labs and teams here in India.

Most critically, India needs enforcement teeth. The Anna University ghost faculty scandal led to FIR (first information report) filings and potential de-affiliation of over 30 colleges only after a civil society organisation exposed it. What if such vigilance were built into the system? A national academic integrity commission with suo motu powers to investigate and penalise corrupt recruitment practices could serve as a deterrent.

India, which is keen to elevate R&D nationwide, would want systems and processes that prize quality faculty. Global uncertainty, diaspora sentiment, and government incentives have aligned to create a terrific reverse-migration opportunity. But unless India fixes things like opaque hiring processes, cartel-based departmental power, and inadequate lab ecosystems, it risks losing world-class scientists.

The talent is knocking. The timing is right. Now it’s up to Indian academia to rise to this moment.