'Easy to move to another country and give gyan': Angry Namita Thapar on Sabeer Bhatia's '99% Indian engineers...' remark

Namita Thapar, Executive Director at Emcure Pharmaceuticals and Shark Tank India judge, begs to differ from Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia on India's engineering education and work culture.

In a recent podcast, Bhatia flagged the lack of hands-on skills and critical thinking among Indian engineers. He also pointed out that majority of engineering graduates in the country end up in management roles instead of building real products. 

Thapar said in her Instagram Stories that she has lived in the US for 8 years and has met many Indians there who were not very optimistic on the India story. "Latest news 'Sabeer Bhatia giving gyan on quality of Indian engineers'. I lived in the US for 8 years and met many Indians living there who loved bashing India," she wrote in her Instagram stories. 

Furthermore, she urged the government to work on brain drain, which is a "real concern". After this, she turned her attention back to Sabeer Bhatia and said that it is easy to "give gyan" after moving to another country. 

"Please note that its easy to move to another country and give gyan but the real impact and challenge lies in staying in your own country and facilitating change!" 

See Namita Thapar's Instagram story here

What exactly did Sabeer Bhatia say?

In the podcast, Bhatia said: "99 per cent of Indians who graduate as engineers join management and start giving gyaan to everybody. Where is the work ethic, where they really work with their hands and really go and build some stuff?" 

He also highlighted the irony behind India's respect for business luminaries who, in his opinion, promote outsourcing instead of creation of original software.

Further, he underlined that India needs to overhaul its attitude vis-a-vis technical skills and start respecting people who write software, who write codes, who do things, or who think about these problems in a critical way. 

Drawing parallels with China, the Hotmail co-founder said: “China educates everybody. It’s like subsidised education, subsidised cars.”

In India, he commented, “education today is the prerogative of rich. And what do rich do? They want to just get education and go and marry somebody and get dowry. What kind of thinking is this?”