Our government's recent decision on dual nationality did not assuage my feelings of unease, and I continue to agonize over the loss of our best and brightest to the West. I ask myself, does it matter if highly skilled Indians leave? Certainly, I celebrate the success of the Hyderabadi software engineer who makes good in Silicon Valley--she has enhanced the respect for Indians everywhere, and there is no loss in that. But my experience in running a business is that skilled talent is the scarcest commodity in the world and everyone is in a hunt for it. Ask any CEO of a reasonable sized company and he will tell you about the long evenings he has spent trying to persuade a good candidate to join his company. The same goes for nations. America's success is measured not only by its economic or military might but because it is able to attract the best talent from the world.

My dilemma over losing our best is compounded by my passionate belief in free trade and investment, which I am convinced, will eventually bring enormous prosperity to all Indians. Why should I demur when it comes to globalisation of labour? My reason tells me that I should support it but my heart doesn't agree. One side of me thinks of my passport in a deeply emotional way--as a commitment to an identity; but another side says that passports are merely a convenience. A friend of mine has three passports: American, French, and Italian and he doesn't spend much worrying about his nationality. And 93 countries agree with him as they recognise dual citizenship.

Living in the world of passports and visas we tend to forget that these barriers are a recent phenomena. There were no such fences a hundred years ago during the first age of globalisation, which in many ways was a far more liberal than today, especially after 9/11. It was also an age that produced two of our best non-resident Indians Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.

We blame NRIs for not being as patriotic as their Chinese counterparts and not investing enough in India. It's a false comparison, I think, because we fail to recognise that it was only in the 1990s that our NRIs became broadly wealthy and capable of making entrepreneurial investments. The Chinese diaspora of Hong Kong and Taiwan, who are the main investors in China, have had a 15-year head start. Hence, the timing of the government's decision on dual nationality is excellent because this is the moment in history that we need globally successful Indians to link our enterprises with global markets.

Unfortunately, our dual nationality policy is flawed, and is going to result in too many Indians giving up their Indian citizenship, and adopting a foreign one. Our babus should learn from the best practices among the 93 dual nationality countriesand give, for example, full citizenship rights to NRIs and virtually the same passport as residents. Few NRIs may, in fact, change their behaviour as a result of dual nationality, but most will get a sense of being valued and of belonging, and that is worth a great deal.I am not in favour of taxing expatriates, as Jagdish Bhagwati and Mihir Desai have suggested. The only solution to bringing our brightest back is to make India a nice place to work. This will only happen if we accelerate the pace of reform. Just as we have reformed telecom--where rates are dropping by the day and queues for phones have virtually disappearedso must we reform power and other infrastructure. Taiwan, South Korea, and China have begun to see a reverse flow in talent. Ireland has become a country of immigrants after centuries of being a land of emigrants. Once we reach Taiwan's level of infrastructure, we too will experience what it did recently. Of the 312 companies in Hsinchu industrial park near Taipei, Silicon Valley returnees have started 113, and 71 of these continue to recruit talent from there.