15% rise in expats returning to India

It was 6 o'clock one morning, when Sanjay Modi, a managing director at Monster.com, the job search portal, got a call from a friend in the US, enquiring for a job in India.

When Modi, who heads the India, Middle East and Southeast Asia division of the portal, pressed his resources into service, he realised his friend was one among many who, after their stints abroad, planned to relocate back home.

Monster.com says their logged number of non-resident Indians seeking jobs back in India has grown 65 per cent in the past year.

It was this trend of a reverse brain drain from 2008-09 that encouraged Modi to launch a new portal called Return2Home, catering specifically to NRIs seeking jobs in India.

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According to personnel consultancy MaFoi Randstad, there was a 10-15 per cent increase in the number of Indians returning to the country in 2010-2011 over 2009-10.

"The trend has been there for some time but the momentum picked up from the end of last year. It is not only the economic uncertainty in the West but also a combination of economic, social, political and other factors that have driven this," says Aditya Narayan Mishra, president (staffing).

The resilience shown by the Indian economy has even helped NRI placements form a good eight per cent of the business for Delhi-based Headhonchos.com.

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"There is a lot of demand from senior and middle management. We have experienced a growth of 15 per cent in the NRI placement segment of the business between January and May. India's projected GDP growth of over eight per cent presents a huge growth opportunity," says Uday Sodhi, its head.

The demography of the home-bound population is also mixed. It includes skilled professionals with less than six years of experience to those with over a decade.

The growing technology market and hectic activity in the energy and infrastructure industry in India is also contributing to the movement, with candidates from West Asia looking at this opportunity.

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Besides say industry players, Indian companies are willing to match pay levels for the expertise the NRIs bring.

For instance, Eshaan Khan, 58, a mechanical engineer from BIT, Ranchi, who was with Unisis Engineering and spent 20 years of his life working in Saudi Arabia with different organisations, is already getting offers from Indian companies at the salary he drew abroad.

And, then, there is the added lure of being close to their family which is driving their decisions.