By HEATHER TIMMONS

NEW DELHI - In recent years, Mother India has welcomed back tens of thousands of former emigrants and their offspring. But many Indians who spent most of their lives in North America and Europe are finding they can’t go home again.

For many returnees the cultural ties and chance to do good that drew them back are overshadowed by workplace cultures that feel unexpectedly foreign and can be frustrating. Sometimes returnees discover that they share more in their attitudes and perspectives with other Americans or with the British than with other Indians. Some stay just a few months, some return to the West after a few years.

About 100,000 “returnees” will move from the United States to India in the next five years, estimates Vivek Wadhwa, a research associate at Harvard University who has studied the topic. These repats, as they are known, are drawn by India’s booming economic growth, the chance to wrestle with complex problems and the opportunity to learn more about their heritage. They are joining multinational companies, starting new businesses and even becoming part of India’s sleepy government bureaucracy.

But a study by Mr. Wadhwa and other academics found that 34 percent of repats found it difficult to return to India - compared with just 13 percent of Indian immigrants who found it difficult to settle in the United States. The repats complained about traffic, infrastructure, bureaucracy and pollution.

Returnees run into trouble when they “look Indian but think American,” said Anjali Bansal, managing partner in India for Spencer Stuart, the global executive search firm. People expect them to know the country because of how they look, but they may not be familiar with the way things run, she said. Similarly, when things don’t operate the way they do in the United States or Britain, the repats sometimes complain.

“India can seem to have a fairly ambiguous and chaotic way of working, but it works,” Ms. Bansal said. “I’ve heard people say things like ‘It is so inefficient or it is so unprofessional.’ ” She said it was more constructive to just accept unfamiliar customs .

For Shiva Ayyadurai, that was not easy. Nearly four decades ago, at age 7, he left Mumbai with his family but promised himself he would return to India someday to help his country.

In June, Mr. Ayyadurai, now 45, moved from Boston to New Delhi hoping to make good on that promise. An entrepreneur and lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was the first recruit of an ambitious government program to lure talented scientists of the socalled desi diaspora back to their homeland.

“It seemed perfect,” he said recently of the job opportunity. It wasn’t.

As Mr. Ayyadurai sees it now, his Western business education met India’s notoriously inefficient, opaque government, and things went downhill from there. Within weeks, he and his boss were fighting. In October, his job offer was withdrawn. Mr. Ayyadurai has moved back to Boston.

While several authors of Indian origin have penned soul-searching tomes about their return to India, and dozens of business books exist for Western expatriates trying to do business here, the guidelines for the returning Indian manager or entrepreneur are still being drawn.

There are no shortcuts to spending lots of time working in the country, returnees say.

“There are so many things that are tricky about doing business in India that it takes years to figure it out,” said Sanjay Kamlani, the cochief executive of Pangea3, a legal outsourcing firm with offices in New York and Mumbai. Mr. Kamlani was born in Miami, where his parents emigrated from Mumbai, but he has started two businesses with Indian operations.

When Mr. Kamlani started hiring in India, he met with a completely unexpected phenomenon: some new recruits would not show up for work on their first day. Then, their mothers would call and say they were sick for days in a row. They never intended to come at all, he realized, but “there’s a cultural desire to avoid confrontation,” he said.

After taking a government job in New Delhi, Shiva Ayyadurai
clashed with the bureaucracy. He decided to move back to Boston. / CANDACE FEIT FOR THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE