Kapur - Diaspora, Development, and Diamonds: the Domestic Impact of International migration from India

W HEN ONE HAS been working on any project over many years, one collects many debtsand I have more than my fair share.

My interest and research on the impact of international migration on the countries of origin began when I was a faculty member in the government department at Harvard University. With support from the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC, and working jointly with a colleague in the economics department, John McHale, we wrote a monograph looking at this issue worldwide, Give Us Your Best and Brightest: The Global Hunt for Talent and Its Impact on the Developing World (Washington, DC: Center for Global Development and Brookings Institution, 2005).

Since then, I have worked with John on a range of papers on this subject, some jointly, some with other colleagues (notably Ajay Agrawal and Mihir Desai). Throughout, Johns intellect and openness and his personal warmth and decency have deeply influenced my thinking, and the framework in owes much to Johns conceptualization of the issue.

Over the years my thinking on these issues has been influenced by a number of friends and colleagues: Arun Abraham, Michael Clemens,K.P. Krishnan,Atul Kohli, Pratap Mehta, Partha Mukhopadhyay, Karthik Muralidharan, Urjit Patel, Lant Pritchett, Anand Shah, Arvind Subramanian and Richard Webb. Discussions with Steve Wilkinson were particularly helpful in sharpening my arguments and improving the manuscript. Wendy Pearlman meticulously read the page proofs and not only helped correct errors in style and judgment but also in making me think of the sorts of thing I should have done.

The project began with seed funding from the American Institute for Indian Studies, for a year-long stay in India. I spent a year at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), where I was hosted by Professor Pankaj Chandra and his family, whose friendship and hospitality are unbounded. Professor Errol DSouza (also at IIM-A) generously helped educate me on some of the conceptual issues of the macroeconomics of remittances, with his characteristic clarity. Ambassador Jayant Prasad helped to bring me up to speed on official Government of India thinking.

Subsequently, funding from the Asia Center, the Weatherhead Initiative, and the Milton Grant (all at Harvard); the Macarthur Foundation; and a gift from the Diego Hidalgo Foundation were all extremely helpful in supporting the project.

Rebecca Thornton, then a graduate student at Harvard, was instrumental in designing the survey questionnaires. The Indian surveys were added to the Indian Readership Survey. I am deeply grateful to Ashok Das, managing director at Hansa Research, and his staff for their enormous help in making this possible. The list of unique Indian last names was put together from phone directories in India by P. K. Kapoor and his team, to whom I owe much gratitude. The database of Indian Americans was built with the help of proprietary databases of InfoUSA. I am especially grateful to Bill Hippen, who time and again worked with me in building this database. The phone survey (and data entry) of Indian Americans was managed by ORG-Marg in Mumbai.

The large survey data sets that were specifically built for this project were checked and analyzed by Randy Akee, Vaibhav Gujral, and Atul Pokharel, who all spent long hours helping me with this when they might have been doing something better!

The case study of the role of the Indian diaspora in the development of the diamond industry in India in was developed by Arjun Raychaudhuri, at the time a Rhodes scholar in Oxford. Arjun organized a team to painstakingly craft this database with his characteristic good humor and care. Some of the findings from this data set were presented at a conference at SAIS at Johns Hopkins and part of which appeared in the journal India Review. I am grateful to Ramchandra Guha and Sunil Khilnani for correcting my historical errors.

For , Diego Miranda helped research the concept of elites and how Indian elites historically differed from others around the world, especially Latin America, a region with which he was deeply familiar. This chapter has also benefited from comments and suggestions made by seminar participants at the University of TexasAustin, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Cornell, and Brown.

The discussion of the role of the Indian diaspora in Indo-U.S. relations in draws heavily on interviews by Manik Suri for his senior thesis at Harvard, which I supervised. Manik was very generous in sharing the interview material and later in reading, commenting on, and editing not just this chapter, but the entire manuscript, for all of which he has my deep gratitude.

I am indebted to Radu Tatucu for the analysis in very helpful in their suggestions and comments on the statistical aspects and interpretations, and the limits to the claims that could be made. Bharat Ramamurti helped put together the survey of Indian diasporic philanthropy.

A years leave at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies under the aegis of the Program in Democracy and Development allowed me time to finally complete the manuscript. I am deeply grateful to Atul Kohli and Deborah Yashar for making that possible. Several students helped enormously in putting the manuscript together and rectifying the many inevitable glitches. I am grateful to Katia Alexander, Megan Crowley, Deepa Iyer, Ritu Kamal, Sagar Raju, Anjali Salooja, Yashas Vaidya, and Shreya Vora.

Working with Chuck Myers and his colleagues at Princeton University Press (especially Sara Lerner) has been a pleasure. His patience and commitment helped draw this long project to a close and his many thoughtful suggestions considerably improved the manuscript. Jennifer Harris copyedited the manuscript and Sherry Smith created the index, both with admirable care and meticulousness.

Finally, my wife, Sadhana, and children, Maya and Kunal, patiently and good-humoredly bore my long absences from their livesbut as I bring this to an end, I hope to make amends!