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A silent exodus of South Asians
Vancouver-based restaurant manager Sohil Roy is packing his bags this holiday season to return to his homeland.
There he will get married next month to the woman he met on a dating site and settle down on the outskirts of Mumbai to pursue his dreams of opening up his own restaurant.
“I love Canada but I just can’t make ends meet here to open my own restaurant…India is booming and there a lot of opportunities there now,” he said.
Roy is not alone. India, experiencing unprecedented economic growth, is seeing a tremendous change in terms of lifestyle, salaries and opportunities.
And nowhere more is this visible than the annual wedding season of mid-October to January and April to July.
According to Delhi-based marriage broker Gopal Suri the global recession has been good for his business.
With a large number of Indians coming back to settle in India since the last three years, the number of marriages for NRIs returning home that Suri arranged this year was three times the number he did in 2010.
"Eighty percent of the boys born between 1975-80 had shifted in the 90s to countries like the US to study and work. For the girls in the same bracket, the ratio became like 1:15. Now the same lot is returning to marry and settle here," he told the Hindustan Times.
Every year thousands of Indian men travel home to seek brides in their homeland but a reverse trend has been taking place over the last few years said Chennai-based Murugavel Janakiraman, founder of a popular marriage portal.
Reports indicate that up to 300,000 NRIs may return and settle in India by 2015.
According to a 2010 Associated Chambers of Commerce & Industry report, the Indian economy will create nearly 90 million new jobs by 2015.
As the silent exodus expects to get bigger, recruitment tendering platform MyHiringClub.com had launched a dedicated job portal in India to provide online job/recruitment services to Non-Resident Indians (NRI) job seeker who want to go back to their home country.
“There has been tremendous response from NRI job seekers and employees,” said owner Rajesh Kumar. About 1117 companies and recruitment consultants and almost 4500 job seekers from abroad and India have already registered with our portal.
Geeta Khanna, who started her marriage consultancy three years ago, says there is a section of NRI men who want to marry Indian women with the intention of moving back.
"India is emerging as a financial powerhouse, the economic crunch in the western economies and a higher redundancy rate is responsible for the reverse migration," she told Hindustan Times.
The migration is largely in families that have large businesses or financial interests in India. Rekha Vaid, marriage counsellor with a marriage bureau in Delhi, says nearly half of their clients are NRIs who want partners from India.
"With travel becoming easy, economies opening up, they feel that settling in India is better."
With the rising level of affluence and job opportunities, successful women today have more choices within India and their own cities, when it comes to choosing a life partner. "They feel professionals in India are as smart, qualified and well-paid as their NRI counterparts," says Janakiraman.
Many successful women are not keen on quitting high-paying jobs in their cities and moving to the West, where it may take years to get working visas or jobs. "They are no longer looking to marry Indian men who live and work overseas, even though they may be professionals themselves. This is because there is greater physical comfort living in India which they don't wish to compromise on. This is a reverse in thinking of the Indian woman, who earlier thought living in the US or UK was what dreams were made of," says Khanna.
The reverse wedding pattern is also seeing a slowdown in the tradition big fat Indian weddings. Many Indian families scale down their celebrations over the past 12 months.The industry is estimated to be worth 1.25 trillion rupees (US27 billion dollars) a year. One leading wedding website Shaadi.com put the average cost of a high-end marriage at $44,000 dollars.
But wedding planners say that as the effect of the worldwide recession hits exports, imports and the service industry, India’s wealthier urban upper classes are cutting back on costs.
“People are curbing expenses", said Tejal Kadakia, who founded Knot Forever, a Mumbai-based wedding management firm.
A traditional Indian wedding is lengthy and elaborate, starting with a trip to the astrologer or family priest who chooses the auspicious day and time of the ceremony considering phases of the moon.
Rings are exchanged at the engagement, followed by the “mehndi” ceremony, where the bride’s arms and legs are intricately painted with brown henna dye to ward off evil and strengthen love.
The next day sees an elaborate “sangeet” – a musical, dance or even Bollywood-style extravaganza.
The wedding itself usually comes 24 hours later, followed by cocktails and a lavish evening meal.
Moroccan- or Turkish-style weddings – with billowing tents, vast pavilions, hookah smoking pipes and finely-upholstered, low-slung divans – have proved popular with expat Indians who travel home to tie the knot.
Nevertheless, Bollywood song-and-dance events remain hugely popular with overseas Indians, particularly those from the United States and Canada.
Many overseas-based Indians or people of Indian origin choose to get married in India due to cheaper costs and its cultural significance.
As for Roy from Vancouver , he plans a big lavish wedding.
“It is sort of welcome home present to myself,” he said.
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