Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu has reposted a video on ‘X’ of White House advisor Sriram Krishnan, who has Indian roots. In the clip, Krishnan discusses that the US wants its allies, including India, to use American AI. The White House advisor said, “We want to make sure that the world uses the American AI stack…We also want the world to use our AI model…We want all our allies, including India, to leverage our AI infrastructure.”
What is brain drain?
Brian drain is a concept used to explain the large skill emigration of skilled workers and professionals to another country, which is usually developed and provides better standard of living.
This concept has been used increasingly in the last decade to explain the thousands of students that are going abroad to developed nations like US and UK. They often try to land a job there too. According to NITI Aayog, for every one foreign student that comes to India for higher education, 25 Indians go to foreign universities. In 2024, 13.36 lakh Indian students went abroad for higher studies.
However, the exact figures when it comes to Indians getting jobs abroad each year are quite complex. The data regarding students does help paint a picture.
India needs to stop Brain drain!
Sridhar Vembu pointed out that this was a problem that the country faced. He hinted that India was losing top talent such as Krishnan to foreign nations, and this was having a deep impact to sovereign tech advancements. Vembu wrote, “This is why brain drain is costly.”
The Zoho CEO made it clear that the country must work on securing the best talent of the next generation to ensure that it can have the best people working here. He explained, “We must fight hard to retain the next generation of talent in India.”
Vembu once again compared global technology giants to the historic British East India Company, asserting that today’s Big Tech firms possess financial and strategic influence on par with sovereign nations.
“Big tech is bigger than most sovereign nations. ‘East India Company’ is the way to think about them,” Vembu wrote on social media platform X on February 14, reiterating an analogy he first made weeks earlier.
This comment comes as discussions intensify about the vast scale, financial power, and geopolitical sway held by global tech corporations. Vembu’s response was triggered by a comparison of Alphabet’s recent $32 billion debt raise, which was completed in just 24 hours, to the much longer timeframes that governments typically need to mobilize similar amounts of capital.