Every year, thousands of Indians make the same move in the opposite direction: they leave for the United States chasing better pay, bigger problems and a global career. A smaller number do the reverse. They give up settled lives abroad and come home to build something of their own.
Two of them, Dr Anand Deshpande, founder, chairman and managing director of Persistent Systems, and Kishore Indukuri, founder of Sid’s Farm, spoke to Financial Express Digital about why they left promising careers in the US and started over in India.
There’s a question that follows almost every Indian techie in the US around through the H-1B renewals, the promotions, the comfortable suburb: should I go back and build something of my own? Most file it away. A few act on it.
Dr Anand Deshpande and Kishore Indukuri acted on it decades before “reverse brain drain” became a phrase. One left HP Labs in Palo Alto; the other walked out of Intel. Both went home to start over with no safety net and built companies now worth hundreds, even thousands, of crores. They told Financial Express Digital why they made the bet, and what they’d tell anyone weighing the same one.
Why Anand Deshpande left a successful life in America
For Dr Anand Deshpande, founder, chairman and managing director of Persistent Systems, coming back was never an impulse. He had decided to return long before he set foot in HP Labs.
“I was always very keen to come back to India, mainly for family reasons. That is what I had decided when I left for the US for my PhD in 1984,” he told Financial Express Digital.
He loved the work at HP Labs, one of the world’s most respected technology research centres. His visa let him stay 18 months, and rather than chase a longer-term one, he chose to head home.
The timing was nudged along by a talk he attended in California by N Vittal, then Secretary of the Department of Electronics, who urged Indian professionals abroad to come back and help build the country’s software industry. “This aligned well with my timing, and I decided to take the plunge,” Deshpande said.
The decision, he stresses, was about wanting to live in India, not about leaving America. “When I returned, I was 28 years old. Life in America was good, and I could have stayed on.”
But he reasoned that building something meaningful meant starting early. “I always felt that if I had to take a chance and try to do something exciting from India, the earlier I got going, the better off I would be,” he said.
Single, and just 18 months into his US stint, he saw a bigger draw than a junior research role: “The opportunity to build something of my own was quite exciting, and I decided to take the chance and come back to set up Persistent Systems.”
How Anand Deshpande built Persistent Systems into a Rs 12,000 crore company
Returning was the easy part. The hard part was building a technology company in an India that looked nothing like today’s.
Deshpande came back in October 1990 and launched Persistent Systems in Pune with Rs 2 lakh, topped up with money borrowed from friends and family. “Life in India was quite difficult. This was before India had opened up. It would take months to get a phone connection,” he said.
Capital and imports were punishing too: “We paid 18% interest on bank loans and export zones were critical because we levied a 300% duty on electronics.”
The environment slowly improved as the government rolled out tax holidays for software exports and software technology parks came up.
Deshpande won his first projects through contacts abroad, but the defining break came in 1992. “Our biggest breakthrough came in 1992 when we received a small project from Microsoft,” he said. His expertise in database systems later helped Persistent land more specialised work.
Today, Persistent generates close to Rs 12,000 crore in revenue, though Deshpande resists the obvious framing. “When people look at Persistent today, they tend to see a 36-year growth story. I see it as a 36-year reinvention story,” he said.
His core belief: remake the company before growth stalls. “We’ve done that several times, from databases in the 1990s to Outsourced Product Development in the 2000s to SMAC and now to digital engineering and AI. Each time, we moved before the previous model peaked.”
Another early call was to go deep rather than wide. “Our decision to work in a niche rather than compete for a small piece of the larger market allowed us to be differentiated. We defined the category and built our identity around it,” he said.
For Indians in the US weighing a move home, Deshpande thinks the usual question is the wrong one. “I would tell them they are asking the wrong question. The better question is, ‘Where can I create the greatest impact with the skills, experience and perspective I have built over the years?’”
India, he notes, is a far better launchpad now than in 1990. “Today, India offers a deep technology talent pool, world-class digital infrastructure, a vibrant startup ecosystem and a growing appetite for innovation. But none of these advantages can replace clarity of purpose,” he said. “Come back if you have something meaningful to build or contribute to and believe India offers the right opportunities.
A clear sense of purpose will carry you much further than any market conditions.”
Why Kishore Indukuri left Intel and returned to India
Kishore Indukuri’s pull homeward was just as strong. He grew up in a middle-class Hyderabad family, worked his way into IIT Kharagpur, and moved to the US for a fully funded Master’s and PhD in polymer sciences at UMass Amherst.
He then joined Intel, where he spent six years — first in quality and reliability, learning the anatomy of a semiconductor chip. “I spent my time tinkering with chips, understanding what they looked like, what were the different layers, and most importantly, failure analysis,” he said.
The next three years, in Intel’s manufacturing division, were more gruelling. “I used to start at 7.30 am on the production floor and stay there till 11.30 pm,” he said. It was also when he became a father — which only sharpened a plan he’d always held.
“Coming back home was always the plan. I wanted to come back home and do something here,” he said.
“When we had our first son, I started appreciating my parents more deeply, and the thought of family pulled me back too.”
How Kishore Indukuri built Sid’s Farm from 20 cows to a Rs 200 crore business
The spark for entrepreneurship was deeply personal. His son had multiple allergies and could tolerate very few foods. “Our son was struggling with several allergies, and the only food that he could tolerate was milk,” he told Financial Express Digital.
Finding milk they could trust was the hard part. “As parents, there is no deeper sense of anguish than to see your child suffer,” he said.
That search became Sid’s Farm. Indukuri walked into an industry he knew almost nothing about — and wasted little energy worrying. “Honestly, I am a hopelessly hopeless optimist. I don’t think about failure, I only think about how I can make things work,” he said.
The business began with 20 cows on a leased farm near Hyderabad. “The first time we had to travel to Tamil Nadu in a lorry to bring our first few cows home, I am sure my family thought I had lost my mind,” he said.
His engineering training reframed dairy as a problem to solve: “My education taught me to be endlessly curious, put my head down, and simply keep executing.”
The intensity caught him off guard. “There were days when we used to wake up at 1.30 am to milk the cows so that we could deliver milk by 6 am,” he said — describing dairy as three businesses at once: production, testing and processing, and home deliveries.
The early years were lean. “For the first few years, we operated with little to no money,” he said.
Sid’s Farm has since grown from 20 cows to around 80,000 litres of milk a day, through a sequence of channels — direct delivery before D2C was fashionable, then subscription platforms, then quick commerce.
The pandemic tested the model and validated it. “The deliveries didn’t stop even for a day during the lockdown,” he said.
Today, Sid’s Farm clocks around Rs 200 crore in revenue, with food safety at the centre of its pitch. “Our mission is to make safe food a norm in Indian homes,” he said.
Every batch is tested for adulterants, antibiotic residues, induced hormones and other contaminants. “If even a single batch does not meet any of these quality standards, it never enters our system,” he said.
Trust was built the slow way. “For the first four years, I spoke to every single customer we served myself,” he said.
For all his years in the US, Indukuri is clear about where he belongs. “India is home, and it is where I want to build and take India to the world,” he said. “I would say I have an equal amount of love and respect for both the countries.”