Majority of people we loose to west are youth who migrate on study visa and stay on work visa like working on hotels or warehouses.
Nadella or Pichai etc. are hypersuccessful exceptional leaders of an invisibly small minority which off course exists in India's modern entrepreneurs too.
We though certainly have lost significant manpower which could add 2-3 percentage points in growth every year.
even now there will be enough number of middle management folks within the country, who are capable of such leadership roles. brain drain was there in our school text books too, we will need think beyond trying to figure out additional factors.
as far as i know, only TATA group have such a talent grooming program, they identify and groom talent very early, they move identified top talent around their various companies for them to gain experience in various sectors, and their CXO positions are filled from within this talent pool.
an argument can also be made, that 30 years(of market liberalisation) is not enough for market to stabilise, for long term trends to emerge . and with in those 30 years, 10 years got wasted by failing to sustain the market momentum. and even on failures, there were only a handful of major corporate failures, satyam, sahara, and kingfisher.
instead of bothering too much about the past, let's see if in next 30 years, talent will supported by funds to create new market magic. for subject matter experts to emerge in industries, the industry itself needs to be on growth path for atleast multiple decades, where growth momentum of the industry is an incentive for an talented a young man to stay the course for a few decades and not just chasing salary hikes by jumping companies in quick succession, so that by the time he is 40 or 50 years old he has seen enough end to end cycles of success and failures to know which paths to take or not take.
in our case, since all new market trends are borrowed from outside, as in whatever tech/market trend is happening outside, our money bags chase it, which makes our trends dependant on global factors. which leaves limited choices for our young men, they don't know if the career choice they make will last a decade or two.
one conclusion we can arrive, is that to create domestic market magic, it has to be a completely novel domestic origin product or service category, so that the talent within the country can dictate the global trend ,if it becomes global brand it's a plus.
they are broken, so they see everything as broken.
