Since the end of November, Parag Agrawal is the new CEO of Twitter following the resignation of Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of the social network. Agrawal has joined the growing group of Indian-born CEOs who control some of the largest technology companies in the world and based in the United States.
It is a particular circumstance, which has historical and economic reasons, linked to the tradition of technical universities in India and to the systems for granting study and work visas provided for by US law.
Among the most famous Indian-born CEOs in Silicon Valley is Sundar Pichai, who heads Alphabet and its subsidiary Google. Pichai has held this position since 2015, when company co-founder Larry Page chose to resign. Then there are the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, that of Adobe, Shantanu Narayen and the CEO of IBM, Arvind Krishna. Taken together, they control companies with an overall market value of around $ 5 trillion.
Agrawal and others have similar histories, related to their training at one of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), universities that specialize primarily in computer training. IITs are public and their history dates back to just before Indian independence from the United Kingdom in 1947, when the need arose to better organize university education in science and technology in the country.
IITs are now present in 23 cities in India and are considered prestigious universities not only among Indians, but also in Western countries where the demand for electronic engineers, computer scientists, developers and designers by IT companies has gradually increased. Their attendance guarantees great job opportunities and for this reason every year millions of young people apply for enrollment, undergoing a rather severe selection process.
For the entrance exam organized in 2021, for example, it is estimated that over 2.2 million candidates have registered for 16 thousand places available in the various faculties. The posts are coveted and in addition to the severity of the tests, there are entry rules to reduce the effects of the caste system, which, although formally abolished, continues to deeply affect the organization of society in India.
15 percent of the available places are for the so-called “recognized castes” (“Scheduled Castes” or “Dalit / Paria” once defined as “untouchable”) and 7.5 percent for those belonging to the “recognized tribes” (” Scheduled Tribes ”or“ Adivasi ”), the various disadvantaged and historically marginalized social groups for which a slow process of emancipation is still underway today. This implies that in some cases students with slightly below average scores are admitted, indicating the different opportunities for access to educational institutions before university.
Despite the selection methods, Dalit students say they suffer discrimination in their studies and live in environments where they are still marginalized, compared to those belonging to the higher and wealthiest castes. It is a circumstance that occurs in several other areas of Indian society, despite the country's Constitution having recognized the principles of secularism and egalitarianism, promoting laws to favor the integration of the marginalized. The caste system has evolved with the emergence of the urban middle class, where it is above all economic results that count, but there are still fewer opportunities for access for the Dalits, who are unlikely to redeem themselves from conditions of severe poverty. Dalits across the country are about 200 million out of 1.4 billion inhabitants.
In IITs, those belonging to the wealthier classes usually have more career opportunities, but it is still true that the training received allows those who are most disadvantaged to find work or to continue their studies abroad, thanks to various programs for post-graduate courses. – graduates and doctorates.
The United States is one of the main destinations for IIT students, whose study courses have elements in common with those of US universities. The type of selection with the entrance tests, the high competition (with many distortions, sources of great stress for the attending students) and the high level of training contribute to making Indian students very popular.
The rapid growth of the last decades in the technology sector in the United States has meant that there is a high demand for computer engineers, designers and developers, which cannot be filled by drawing solely from the most important US universities. For this reason, many companies are looking for new employees among IIT students, sometimes even before they have finished their studies or by offering scholarships.
In fact, US IT companies invest in various projects involving IITs, setting up important networks of relationships. Back in 2004, Microsoft's then CEO, Bill Gates, commented on the success of Indian technical universities by pointing out that Microsoft over the years had invested more money in IITs than any other institution outside the United States and the United Kingdom.
Agrawal, the new Twitter CEO, for example, graduated from IIT Mumbai in 2005 and later moved to the United States for a doctorate at Stanford University. After working for Microsoft and Yahoo, he was hired by Twitter as a computer engineer in 2011. He then made a career within the company, becoming its technical director (CTO) in 2017 and taking care of various projects, including one to implement a protocol for make social networks communicate with each other in a decentralized system.
His appointment has sparked some controversy among those who have reported an Agrawal descent from the Brahmins caste, the one which is recognized most important in the traditional Indian social system. Some have therefore argued that the career of the new Twitter CEO has been defined by his social status, and therefore cannot be considered a story of redemption and emancipation. It is a recurring theme in reflections on workers of Indian origin in Silicon Valley, among whom a division that reflects the traditional one of caste would be recreated.
In reality, the lineage of Agrawal has been traced back to the Banyans, historically the caste of merchants and bankers, today associated mostly with that of entrepreneurs and business leaders. Beyond castes, Agrawal comes from a wealthy family: his father was an official in the Indian Ministry of Atomic Energy, while his mother was a teacher.
His story is common to that of other computer scientists of Indian descent who quickly moved from academic institutions to US companies. Pichai is 49 years old and has a BS in metallurgical engineering from IIT Kharagpur, as well as a couple of masters after moving to the US.
After some jobs in consulting firms, in 2004 Pichai was hired by Google, where in the following years he took care of the development and management of some important projects such as those related to the Chrome browser and the Drive service to save and share files online. During his career he also worked on several other services offered by the company, including Gmail and Android, before becoming CEO.
Pichai's origins are also traced back to the Brahmins, even if the person concerned has never directly mentioned the caste system. However, on several occasions Pichai said he lived in a relatively wealthy family, with his father an engineer of the American multinational General Electric and owner of a company that produced electronic components.
Satya Nadella, head of Microsoft, is 54 years old and moved to the United States in the late 1980s after attending a private technical university. He then earned a master's in computer science and one in business administration. In 1992 he started working for Microsoft, mainly dealing with projects related to cloud technologies, for remote file and system management. He is considered one of the proponents of the company's major industry successes and has served as CEO since 2014, when Steve Ballmer, who inherited the leadership of the company from Bill Gates in rather turbulent years, resigned.
Microsoft, Google, Twitter, and numerous other technology companies continue to research and hire computer scientists from India and beyond to grow their workforce. Hiring is favored by US laws and the visa system (such as the H-1B one) which allows companies to hire skilled workers from abroad, who are therefore graduates or with particular work experience.
The duration of work visas is three years with the possibility of extension for another three, at the end of which the worker is expected to submit a new application. Every year a limited quota of visas is made available, around 200 thousand, and the system often ends up at the center of the political debate on immigration between those who would like to extend its scope and those who would like to significantly limit it.
