Spark 2: Every Rejected Scientist Is A Civilisational Loss. India's Losing Thousands.
Part of our year-end series revisiting Swarajya's most important investigations—stories that illuminate why India underperforms its potential, and what it would take to change.
China pays $700,000 per scientist while India can’t even send a rejection letter.
A Stanford postdoc applied to one of India’s elite research institutes expecting fierce competition for a coveted position. What she got instead was six months of absolute silence—no acknowledgement, no interview, no rejection with feedback she might learn from. Her application, as one senior faculty member familiar with the case described it, “went into a black hole.” That phrase deserves attention because a black hole isn’t merely slow or inefficient; it’s a place from which nothing escapes, not even light, and it’s the perfect metaphor for what happens when India’s brightest minds try to come home.
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Here’s what China did instead. In 2008, they launched the Thousand Talents Plan with starting bonuses of one million yuan, research funding of three to five million, plus housing subsidies, meal allowances, paid home visits, and subsidised schooling for children—everything designed to make the transition back to China as seamless and rewarding as possible.
The programme has since evolved, going quiet in 2021 when Americans started paying attention before resurfacing under new names with even more generous terms. The successor programme, Qiming, now offers signing bonuses between $420,000 and $700,000, operating with deliberate discretion while recruiting in strategically sensitive fields like semiconductors without publicising the identities of its awardees. Since 2008, China has recruited approximately 7,000 scientists, academics, and entrepreneurs back from overseas, guided by a principle they stated openly before Western scrutiny made discretion advisable: “The Party manages talent.”
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Now consider India’s numbers, which tell a starkly different story. A parliamentary panel report from March 2025 revealed that 56% of professor positions at IITs, IIMs, NITs, and IISERs remain unfilled—and this isn’t because candidates don’t exist, since thousands of qualified Indians work at universities around the world. The system has simply lost the ability to absorb what it produces.
The reasons are structural. Insiders point to “lobbies”—departmental cartels organised around community, region, or research area that determine who gets hired regardless of merit. There’s also the curious phenomenon of “ghost faculty,” where a single professor holds positions at dozens of institutions simultaneously, effectively blocking genuine recruitment. “If you are not from these lobbies, then it’s very difficult to enter or survive,” one IIT professor explained, noting that he holds positions at both an IIT and a premier American university, which gives him direct exposure to both systems. The contrast, he says, is stark: “Anyone who is deemed talented and capable there will come through more or less.”
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Both countries understood the same fundamental truth: talent is the currency of the knowledge economy, and the nation that acquires and deploys it will shape the technologies and industries of tomorrow. A scientist in your laboratory is worth infinitely more than a scientist in someone else’s.
But understanding a truth and acting on it are entirely different things. China built a system to acquire talent that is systematic, well-funded, and centrally coordinated, while India built a system that functions to drive talent away—opaque, underfunded, and captured by cartels that prioritise insider networks over national interest. Every scientist who returns home only to find the door closed, every application that disappears into administrative oblivion, every brilliant researcher who concludes that India simply isn’t serious about its future—these aren’t merely personal disappointments but civilisational losses that compound year after year.
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About the year-end/year-beginning special collection: A renaissance requires more than producing brilliance; it requires collecting it, retaining it, deploying it, and building systems that actually work. This investigation is one of 25 sparks in Swarajya’s special edition—stories illuminating why India underperforms its potential, and what it would take to finally change that.
Based on investigations by Karan Kamble and Amit Mishra for Swarajya.
This is one of my gripes with the government that has been at the helm of affairs for more than a decade now. They haven’t even woken up to talent creation or retention or bringing back, when the need for this has been so obvious all along.
Too much reliance on bureaucracy and too much hesitation for anything that might create even scam potential.
Gives me too less a hope for something like this happen any time soon.
A very relevant topic, with President Trump putting a lot of hurdles in the form of visa procedures, and the changing economy in the western world. The usually proactive Modi Government is surprising very lethargic in this case. It is high time a high level expert committee of a dozen or more retired Prominent scientists like Dr. Mashlekar, Dr. T.Ramasamy ( both former heads of CSIR) and the like, is formed to devise ways to attract good Indian talent from abroad to our research institutions and top notch universities/labs like IITs, NITs, IISC, CSIR labs, DRDO etc, with a good salary, a very good working environment and good funding to meet research expenses. It is saddening to hear that a lot of posts are lying vacant in the IITs, NITs etc .