The New Global Indians

They’re smart, they’re ambitious and they’re everywhere.
As India’s economy continues to grow at an unparalleled rate, a highly mobile elite of professional Indians is making its mark across the world as engineers, bankers, entrepreneurs and executives at the very top of multinational companies.
In a new series for BBC Radio 4, Mukti Jain Campion finds out what lies behind their success and the impact they are making in India as well as abroad. (3 x 28')

Programme 1: Indians Shining
The phenomenal rise of The New Global Indians started slowly 20 years ago but has really taken off in the past 10 years. Equipped with the English language and higher degrees from top universities, their ambitions go far beyond being call centre operators or back office workers for the West. Instead they’re making it big as entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, as analysts and bankers on Wall Street and Canary Wharf, buying up British businesses and running global companies.

Programme 2: Uniquely Indian?
India has the largest number of illiterate people in the world, yet it also produces some of the most numerate and ambitious graduates at world-famous establishments such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Mukti visits the campus of IIT Kanpur during recruitment week to find out why the students there are so highly sought-after by multinational companies and meets IIT alumni at their annual global conference in Chicago. Is there anything uniquely Indian behind their success?

Programme 3: Payback
On his recent trip to Washington the Indian Prime Minister described it as his country’s brain gain: the increasing number of successful expatriate Indians who are returning to India to start businesses and run philanthropic projects. In this programme returnees talk about why India is now so attractive to them and we discover the impact they are making on their country - for example, with social projects such as Akshaya Patra, the world’s biggest midday meals programme which feeds a million poor schoolchildren a day.

"illuminating and impressive" - Chris Campling, The Times

Pick of the Day: The Observer, The Independent, The Times, Time Out

Producer Mukti Jain Campion
Executive Producer Charles Miller