The academic year 2023 saw over 750,000 students going abroad to study from India and this is the highest number ever. There are over 1.5 million Indian students studying abroad. While a foreign education does add the requisite skill sets, many students are coming back to India after graduating as opportunities open in India. Dr. Pradeep Khosla, chancellor of the University of California San Diego (UCSD) was in India recently and spoke exclusively with FinancialExpress.com on how India can emerge as an innovation hub for the world. “You can be the innovation hub, you can be the tech capital and a manufacturing destination all at the same time,” he says.
Born in Mumbai, graduating from IIT Kharagpur in 1980, Dr. Khosla left India
FE: India is on its way to becoming the world’s third-largest economy
Dr. Khosla: I think these are not mutually exclusive. You can be an innovation hub; you can be a manufacturing centre and you can be the tech capital all at the same time. There are 1.4 billion people, which is 20% of the world’s population. There is no reason India cannot be everything. And honestly, the vision that the Prime Minister has is in the right direction. For example, I serve on the board of the Indian Semiconductor Association, and we are trying to bring semiconductor manufacturing to the country. I think it’s 30 years too late, but it’s exciting that it’s happening. This is the first government that had the vision to really bring semiconductors and understand semiconductors.
FE: Do you think we realised this need for semiconductors a little too late?
Dr. Khosla: I wish we had done it 30 years ago, but even today, it’s never too late because the demand for semiconductors is only growing and the Indian need for semiconductors is going to grow significantly. So, the more self-sufficient we are, the better off we are. Post Covid, every country is trying to do what we call near-shore manufacturing, to create resilience. In the 90s we created efficiency. We did distributed manufacturing and offshoring. There’s a tradeoff between the two. There must be a balance between the efficiency of manufacturing and resilience of the supply chain.
FE: With the record number of Indian students going abroad to study, do you see this as a kind of “brain drain” or do you see opportunities emerging within India too?
Dr. Khosla: I can tell you a personal story. I left India in 1982. Fast forward 40 years to today – if I knew in 82, the trajectory India was going to have, I would have never left! When I left, I left with the intention of not coming back. But now, when students go abroad, they go with a very high likelihood of coming back. They are taking advantage of opportunities they have to get an education that they may not get in India because, at the end of the day, the top institutions here have limited seats. I don’t see it as brain drain. I think there are more people coming back now than when I left as opportunities are opening up here.
FE: Yet there is an entire generation of Indian-origin CXOs who are now at the helm of the world’s top tech companies, do you see that changing?
Dr. Khosla: Those people are younger than me! We are reaping the benefits of what they have achieved. For example, the Indian economy, like the US, has generated a lot of wealth in the last 20 odd years. There are more Indian billionaires today, there are many more upper-middle-class and middle-class Indians today. I think it has benefited everybody.
FE: What is the overall percentage of Indian students you have enrolled in UCSD?
Dr. Khosla: Only 23% of our students are from out of state, that is out of California. Of that about half are from the rest of the US and the other half are international. About 75% of international students would be Chinese and the rest mixed. So perhaps only about 4% overall would be from India or of Indian origin. We have about 33,000 undergraduate students overall, so you can see the ratio.
FE: What are the key programmes you offer in UCSD and what’s the intake like?
Dr. Khosla: If you look at any of the rankings, UCSD is typically among the top five of the top five public institutions in the US, besides UCLA and UC Berkeley. We get about 160,000 applications per year. We are the second most applied to place in the country. We have more than 100 undergraduate programmes of every shape and size, dealing with arts and humanities, social sciences, biological sciences, life
FE: You do a lot of work in AI and ML as well, isn’t that right?
Dr. Khosla: Our computer science department, which is about 50 years old, is among the top 10 in the country. About five years ago, we built a new programme called the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI) to basically define the future of computing. Data science is the understanding of how you use computation to manipulate and interpret large amounts of data. The way the data sciences institute is structured at UC San Diego, it does not belong to any school. It’s an independent school. It’s very multidisciplinary.
FE: UCSD is partially state funded and also has a lot of philanthropy. What’s your view on similar models emerging in India?
Dr. Khosla: I think India is looking at a similar model. There are private institutions in this neighbourhood that follow a very American model of philanthropy, of growth based on undergraduate programmes, and building very high-quality programmes. The next 20 to 50 years are the years of India. I think you are going to see more growth. I think you are going to see more achievement of excellence. Chandrayaan-3 was just one example. Anything that India focuses on is going to become strong and dominant. I’m extremely bullish. It is the age of India!
FE: When you say ‘the age of India’, would that mean the country will see more innovation emerging?
Dr. Khosla: Innovation is a great example. India has more unicorns now than it ever did before. When I graduated, the only, “startup” that one could think about was HCL. I was on the board of HCL. Fast forward to now, and there are so many people who have created first-generation wealth because of startups
FE: What kind of collaborations and partnerships do you have with Indian institutions?
Dr. Khosla: About six years ago, I was involved in founding something on the Tata Institute for Genetics and Society (TIGS). Ratan Tata gave $70 million to UC San Diego with the whole idea of spending about half of it here and the other half in the US. The thought behind this gift was to train the cutting edge, people in biological and life sciences who specialise in CRISPR and genomic technologies. We have half the people sitting in Bengaluru and the other half in San Diego. It has been a great collaboration. A year ago we hired a director, who was initially from San Diego, but now we have a director in India to make it independent. It’s also about capacity building. Unlike in IT, where we were providing services early on, here we will be providing intellectual capital, startup capital, and creating startups.
FE: What’s one of the most recent educational developments at UCSD that has excited you?
Dr. Khosla: The thing that I was really excited about was eradicating malaria using this gene drive technology, which is what created Tata Institute for Genetics and Society. That was the whole idea. As we speak, we are building several new technologies in three-dimensional imaging, four-dimensional genomic modelling and so on. To put this in context, the reason I’m not able to pick one or the other is our research portfolio is $1.8. billion, and so I can’t just pick one or two.
FE: What initiatives do you have to ensure UCSD is accessible and affordable to your students?
Dr. Khosla: In the context of the tuition fee at UC San Diego, you will be shocked. If you are a state of California resident, the fee is $15,000 per year. And if you live on campus, living expenses might be like $20,000 a year. If you are from outside California, it is about $48,000, which is still significantly lower than the $65,000 to $70,000 at other private institutions.
Every California resident admitted to UC San Diego is given a financial aid package. We admit people without knowing your financial situation. About 40% are Federal Pell Grant recipients. They come from families that make less than $40,000 a year. If students are from out of state, the state does not allow us to give financial aid packages.
FE: Many US institutes are setting up offshore campuses in India. Do you have such plans too?
Dr. Khosla: Yes, we have plans, but we have not done much about it. What I want to do is, instead of setting up an offshore campus in India, I want to collaborate with high-quality institutions out here. That has a couple of advantages. We don’t have to build infrastructure. And we can help some other institutions rise up faster than they would on their own. Tata Institute was one example of research only. The next thing I want to do is to tie up with an academic institution, especially in the context of a new centre, the 21st Century India centre. It is based on my belief that this is India’s century. We have a centre called 21st Century China Center already. I think India is going to be growing faster than China is growing. If you look at the technology stack, the IT stack of India is spectacular. Manufacturing, space research, and entrepreneurship is going to have a big impact. We want to be the think tank that understands the social dynamics and creates policy recommendations in a neutral manner.
FE: Getting into colleges in India is a lot tougher than getting into colleges in the US. Is that right?
Dr. Khosla: I think it’s true. I personally disagree with the admission system out here. Everything out here is reduced to a single number. Whether it is by one test or five subject tests, it doesn’t matter. Take the IITs, for example. I don’t know what the numbers are today. But at the time I took the exam more than one lakh students took the exam and the input was like 1,200. That is just a little over 1%. So, one small mistake can get you out of the picture. That sensitivity is too high. It’s getting better now.
