The term brain drain was coined by the spokesmen of the Royal Society of London to describe the outflow of scientists and technologists to the United States and Canada in the early 1950s. Since then the term has become synonymous with human capital or the migration of highly educated individuals from the developing, mostly third world countries, to the developed ones.
Over the past few decades, more since Pakistan has been lurched full throttle into economic and political chaos, the phenomenon has become the bane of the society. The number of repining Pakistanis who wish to settle abroad is rising every year and the ones who are actually capable of breaking loose are coincidentally the educated ones, contributing alarmingly to the growing crisis of the Pakistani brain drain. To leave the country and settle abroad has become the zeitgeist of current day Pakistan.
Unfortunately either the government does not realize the severity of the problem or prefers to brush it under the proverbial rug like so many other issues. The migration of the Pakistani professionals to foreign countries, namely, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand has increased considerably with young educated and skilled Pakistani such as doctors, IT Experts, scientists and other professional either already gone or planning to leave. The fact that workers from all skill levels are losing or have completely lost faith in the economic future of the country was revealed by the Gallup survey that indicated that even the semi-skilled and unskilled workers want to migrate outside in search of better prospects. 62 percent of the adults who were surveyed expressed the desire to migrate abroad while 38 percent said that they would prefer to settle outside permanently.
It is often thought that the transmittance of funds by the ones who leave the country as a result of brain drain is a good enough substitute for these individuals actually staying in the country and working. But that idea is valid only to a minimal extent as there can be no substitute for services these professionals could be rendering the country by staying within the borders and adding to a far rapid economic, scientific and technological development of the country. Again, that can only happen if the proper infrastructure is provided to them whereby the country could earn manifold the money it receives from transmittance from the migrated workers.
According to Dr. Fitzhugh Mullan of George Washington University every doctor who leaves a poor nation leaves a hole that cannot be filled. He says,
“That creates enormous problems for the source country and the educational and health leaders in the country who are attempting to provide healers”.
Research shows that at 20 countries export more than 10 percent of their physician work force to richer nations with nearly no reciprocation as the US exports less than one-tenth of 1 percent of its doctors. Economic factor is primarily responsible for this mass migration of the scientific community from poorer, host countries like Pakistan. In Pakistan the value placed for a scientist with an advanced level degree is Grade 17 which comes with a salary that is totally insufficient to meet the basic requirements of a family. So it is no surprise that the advanced countries are exploiting the situation by offering these individuals far more handsome incentives.
Asif J. Mir writes in ‘Pakistani Think Tank’,
“We cannot achieve long-term economic growth by exporting our human resource. In the new world order, people with knowledge drive economic growth. We talk a lot of poverty alleviation in Pakistan. But who is going to alleviate the poverty-the uncreative bureaucracy that created poverty? Hypothetically, the most talented should lead the people, create wealth and eradicate poverty and corruption”.
Phillip Bonosky, contributing editor of Political Affairs, writes in his book Afghanistan-Washington’s Secret War.
“Pakistan seems to have nothing but problems. Endemic poverty which was Great Britain’s imperial gift to the colonial world-a poverty on which the sun never sets-skilled (badly needed in Pakistan itself) abroad in search for jobs. Hardly any country has suffered more from the brain drain than has Pakistan. Nearly 3,000 (annually) graduates of Pakistan’s medical colleges are jobless; most go abroad. The educated see their future not in their home country but in any country but their own”.
According to a report in the The Observer, London,
“Pakistan is facing a massive brain drain as record numbers of people desperate to leave their politically unstable, economically chaotic country swamp foreign embassies with visa applications-The biggest number of applications for British visas are from Pakistan. Doctors, lawyers and IT professional and leading the exodus, but laborers and farmhands are joining the queues of malnourished people who gather daily outside the US embassy in Islamabad”.
The greatest effect of brain drain on any country is what is seen in Pakistan today; rampant corruption, poor administrations, lack of motivation and a fast diminishing nationalism. Unless there is nationalism there can be no collective progress and poverty and crime will continue to increase under the umbrella of plethoric apathy. Whatever the solution it needs to come fast and it needs to be come now otherwise - when the educated are away, the uneducated will play - as they are playing at the moment.
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@ Haider…..
yes..we have lack of electricity or water…but we are not slaves…of white masters..neither we are 3rd Class Citizen in pakisatn..as all pakis living in US..UK etc are !
Exactly my point. When Hindustan was Iqbal’s land, he wrote for it. When he got Pakistan, being patriotic, he wrote for Pakistan and not Hindustan. And as we all know, Iqbal was hardly a fool…
Well the problem of “brain drain” is not as acute as some self-styled commentators make it out to be. Go to any hospital or clinic or a university in the big cities in Pakistan and one would find USA and UK educated people everywhere, and not just from ordinary run of the mill universities there, but from universities such as Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Imperial College and what not. The thing is that people have become used to stereotyping things. Many think that people only might out of Pakistan, which is an utter non-sense. Like any big country many people also move into Pakistan.
Economic migrants CANNOT be classified as unpatriots.
The same Iqbal who once said that “Saray Jahan Se Acha Hindustan Hamara” later presented the idea of Pakistan. Would you call that unpatriotic? Absolutely not.
All that has been written in the article is true, still not a lot problematic because of the reason that they will eventually return :)
When children grow up, when they are searched multiple times at airport, when they want to sit and talk with the people who can understand them … … ….
Haider:
Lord Byron has said, ‘He who loves not his country, can love nothing’ but you have gone a step further in calling all patriots mindless fools who expect payment for loving their country or contributing to its advancement.
The question is why do they jeopradise their successful careers and go back to one of the most ‘unsafe’ countries in the world where they can’t even get the bare minimum necesseties of life like water and electricity, and at the same time, are deprived of their basic human rights as well??
Just out of patritoism? Only a fool would do so…
I forgot to add… no need to worry about this Shariah business. I know people are worried that they won’t be able to go to cafes and start flirting or hitting on girls, or that their liquor supply will be cut off, but I’m talking about targeting the people who are so poor that they’ll be too busy schooling, then working, to worry about politics.
So maybe at one point 50 years from now we’ll have a country of powerful, educated, enlightened, Muslims who want to worry about the Shariah thing. Well so be it, then. That won’t be our worry, and if the majority of the country is behind a certain course of action, inshallah Allah will see it through.
In the meantime we should probably re-institute Zia ul-Haq’s Shariah laws on a provincial level, letting provincial assemblies vote whether to enact or not. All the militants in the NWFP would turn out for the polls next time, vote it into power, and that province could have all the Hadood Ordinances it wants, and serve as a test vehicle or guinea pig of sorts for the rest of the Islamic world for the next few decades as we slowly educate and develop the area. That, along with strictly controlling the border with Afghanistan and abandoning support for the US and NATO, will end our problems there (well aside from internal sectarian differences which will require some deeper thinking).