The business environment in India has changed to a great deal in favour of better lifestyles for technocrats and NRI's. Twenty years ago, our relatives used to tell us that we had the "best of both worlds" in the US: I say exactly the same to some of the younger generation in India, who have offices in Pune and in San Jose and travel much more frequently than we did a couple of decades ago. So, what's the moral of all this!?
"We came to America for one reason or another, made our names and got rooted here with our children and some even with grand children. But, it is never too late to look back, spend some time and think how we can be useful to India, where we came from!", said Dr. Gajanan Sabnis of Silver Spring, MD . He divides his time equally between US and India (along with some in the Middle East - UAE) after his service of 32 years from Howard University and working for Deloitte to help develop the newly formed Construction and Capital Projects Consulting (Construction Advisory Service).
Dr. Sabnis came to America for his PhD work at Cornell University in 1964, after completing his BE and M Tech from world renown schools such as Elphinstone College (for pre-engineering), VJTI (for undergraduate) and IIT, Mumbai (for graduate work) with flying colors, but with no suitable employment. He returned to Mumbai in 1967 to live there with US Government contract in hand, only to find the bureaucracy in IIT would not allow him to use it. He returned to US for his last 40 years career in professional civil/structural engineering.
He participated at educational and professional conferences and in the technical committees at all levels, and wrote over 100 research papers and more than 15 professional books and made a mark in professional societies both nationally and globally. His last book, as a co-author was "Hee Aaplich Mansay" (Our Own People!) a historical perspective of Marathi people, who migrated to America and was well-received in India and in the US.
He was one of the first few individuals in the US, who worked on the many technical committees related to new topics; these include one major topic of "rehabilitation of concrete structures". Following the bridges work in the late 1970's, he helped guide the original committee of American Concrete Institute (ACI) and worked on it for over 20 years and brought similar work to India and in the US together for technology exchange. He became known for his presentations all over the world for a special topic "Energy-efficient home" as he and his wife Sharda built and where they live in Silver Spring, MD. A special home that he developed received awards and on which he wrote a book and was interviewed on ABC TV in Washington, DC.
Being familiar with education, Dr. Sabnis believes that in India we have an excellent education system. There was a brain-drain due to the lack of opportunities in education and in the job market. Over the last two decades, Dr. Sabnis feels that such a brain drain is created by the political system, which does not work for the people, but for personal gain. Dr. Sabnis has recently initiated a PhD program at VJTI, where he graduated more than 40 years ago. This program is to eliminate some of the barriers and help professional to work on their PhD after years' of experience in the field and professional contribution in Infrastructure Engineering and Management, which has lacked in many parts of the world including India.
Dr. Sabnis said with enthusiasm. He feels that India has tremendous talents besides the world-accepted IT field and if we can work "together" rather than individually and without the State barriers, we can be very successful in the world. With the technology developed in the West and less and less barriers of transferring it to the rest of the world time-wise, there is very good scope for learning from the experiences of individuals like him and others. The business environment in India has changed to a great deal in favor of better lifestyles for technocrats and NRI's. Twenty years ago, our relatives used to tell us that we had the "best of both worlds" in the US; I say exactly the same to some of the younger generation in India, who have offices in Pune and in San Jose and travel much more frequently than we did a couple of decades ago. Because of the progress in technology and communications, the world has really shrunk and that we have much more mobility and lot of possibility of being successful either in the US or in India and the choice is ours to make.