Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the views of India’s highly skilled diaspora on development and civic engagement. By studying their transnational career paths this paper presents how discourses on the development of the nation go hand in hand with notions of self-development.

Paper long abstract:

Research indicates that the notion of migration as a one-way and once-in-a-lifetime cross-border event is becoming highly problematic. By drawing on the "lived experiences of mobility" (Brown, 2002) of India's highly skilled diaspora, I move away from the brain drain perspective that is often used as a paradigmatic spatial lens in the governance of skilled migrations from developing countries (Raghuram, 2008). Interestingly, India's emerging professional classes comprising of India's transnational oriented youth become increasingly linked with discourses of international development, as Smitha Radhakrishnan (2007) points out. Therefore, this study based on ethnographic interviews conducted in Brussels (during 2007-2013) with Indian highly skilled professionals, including self-initiated and company-backed expatriates, investigates their views on development and civic engagement. How they make use of several policy changes within India as well as in European countries to shape their transnational livelihoods are at the centre stage of this analysis. From an agent-centric perspective this research addresses questions such as what career choices and the construction of transnational livelihoods imply in terms of feelings of citizenship and how existing policies and political mechanisms in the homeland as well as abroad shape their transnational biographic navigations and multiple belongings. Educational choices and professional career trajectories in the field of engineering and the ICT industry indicate the central role that the capability for mobility plays in contemporary Indian middle class subjectivity. It is argued that these are the results of risk-avoiding performances of identity through hegemonic choices that constitute and perpetuate regimes-of-mobility.