The Indian Diaspora: Historical and Contemporary Context (2009) edited by Laxmi Narayan Kadekar, Ajaya Kumar Sahoo and Gauri Bhattachariya have made a statistical research on the percentage, reasons, and different aspects of diaspora in India. The book focuses on the international migration and has divided the book into parts containing various essays namely: old Indian diaspora and new Indian diaspora, with supporting essays on both parts. The introduction of the book states that the broad usage of ― “diaspora” (1) became common since the 1970s. As the editor of the journal Diaspora, Khachig Tololyan, commenting on the name of his publication says, ―”We use diaspora‘ provisionally to indicate our belief that once described Jewish, Greek, and Armenian dispersion now shares meanings with a larger semantic domain that includes words like immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest worker, exile community, overseas community, ethnic community” (4).
The Indian Diaspora (2009) has estimated that Indian diaspora is the third largest diaspora following the British and the Chinese. ―Recent population estimates suggest that the Indian diaspora has crossed the mark of 20 million, dispersed around the globe in more than 70 countries. Its population is above 10,000 in 48 countries and more than half a-million in 11 countries” (3) it also states that, ―”unprecedented emigration” (3) of indentured labourers, traders, professionals and employees of the British government to British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, America and Caribbean were witnessed in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Especially, ―”far- reaching emigration of Indian (mainly professionals)” (3) occurred during the post-World War II period. Such emigration of Indians has been categorised into four waves.
The first wave consisted mostly of indentured labourers to the European colonies who filled the spaces left away by the African slaves who were emancipated by the law that banned the practice of slavery, who worked on the basis of contract for a period of five years. The survey states that around 1.5 million people migrated under the indentured system which was terminated in 1917 following the anti-indenture ship campaign led by Indian nationalists.
The second wave of emigration occurred during the post-World War II period that took Indians to developed countries. “Phenomenal changes in the political and economic scenario of the receiving and sending countries led to their new wave of international migration.” (5). This wave led to a shift where the four English-speaking countries like 17 United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand removed the immigration restrictions in the 1960s, where Asians, mostly professionally trained and skilled were allowed to immigrate. The third wave emigration is also a post-World War II phenomenon that took a large scale of Indians to the West Asian countries. “There were only 14,000 Indians in the Gulf in 1948. By 1971, their population had risen to 40,000. During the 1970s and 1980s, there was large-scale immigration to the gulf due to the oil boom. The population of Indian workers which was 1,51,418 in 1975 rose to 5,99,500 in 1981, and to 11,50,000 in 1992. In 1990, there were about 1.4 million Indians in the West Asian countries. In 2001, according to the Ministry of External Affairs report there were 32, 82, 600 Indians in the gulf countries namely Saudi Arabia, The United Arab Emirates, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar. Most of the Indians working in the Gulf are unskilled and semiskilled labourers.” (5)
The last wave consisted of software engineers who chose western countries like USA, since the 1980‘s. They have been considered ―the cream of India, trained in her premier educational institutions such as IITs, IIMs and universities” (5). They have been having a close contact with India in terms of socio-economic interests; migration of these professionals to the developed countries especially after the 1960‘s has been designated by scholars as the period of ―brain drain’ (6) that created negative impacts on India. Yet, there has been a reverse situation in the last decades designated by the scholars as, ‘reverse migration’ (6), ‘brain circulation’ (6) or ‘brain gain’ (6) creating several positive impacts on India.