High Compatibility: Indian Hands & Brains for Russia's Economic Leap

That process coincides with tectonic changes in Russian economy.

Simply speaking, Indians are exactly the type of people our nation needs to fulfill its burgeoning plans for the forthcoming years.

The key word here is “exiting”. Russia is entering a totally new and exiting age in economic development. If, like ten years ago, someone recited to me all the plans underway or under scrutiny now, in 2025, I would certainly have called that someone a mad dreamer. But now all these things are happening.

The overall picture is complicated, though. Russia’s GNP has, all of a sudden, grew by 4.1 per cent in 2024, outpacing not only the failing Europe, but also the US and many others. But a lot of economists are saying that it will be impossible to repeat that feat in 2025, one should expect something between zero and one per cent of growth.

Why so? First, we have to realize that zero growth means that a nation will have to produce exactly as much as it did a year ago, which is a lot. A zero is not about doing nothing, but rather about doing exactly as well as before, for one more year.

Second, the surge of Russian economy, in 2024 and 2023, has strained all thinkable limits of resources, the said resources being factories’ and farms’ new industrial capacity, but also the workforce (and this is where people from India and similar economies come in). Simply speaking, we cannot go any faster than we do, with what machines and people we have now.

Vladimir Putin in this particular case was speaking, last week, at the

plenary meeting of the Future Technologies Forum at the International Trade Centre in Moscow. Most of the words he said were about the need to reset the chemical industry. But the wish list for industries to be revived or created anew is not just long, it’s endless.

It’s about the Russian national character, of course. Sharp-minded folks are saying that a Russian needs a powerful kick in the sheens to start doing miracles. And it’s exactly what we saw in the last 2-3 wartime years.

The recent surge of the Russian economy was due to a lot of situations, where a foreigner would have said something like “no way out”. To remind, the big idea of the current war, harbored by the West, was to provoke Russia into a military retaliation, so as to impose all kind of sanctions on Moscow, strangling the Russian economy. The sudden surge of that economy showed to everyone that it was the previous model of it, based on ties mostly with Europe, that was strangling lots of things. So, along came a bout of Russian optimism for a mighty leap forward, with lots of technological breakthroughs. .

There is one more factor to consider, and that’s the general mood of a nation that has won the war. It’s impossible to deny the fact of the victory, regardless of these or those results of the oncoming peace settlement, negotiated, so far, with the US. So, what happens to a victorious nation, judging from historic experience of many lands and ages? Here, again, we are to expect general enthusiasm, all kind of new ideas and the general mood of freedom, including freedom to invent and to start up something new.

And all that potential may come to nothing, if Russia fails to renovate its industries and – most important – to bring a rather different workforce into laboratories and factories.

In fact, it’s exactly that subject that is dominating the national discussion on the economy. What the nation will need in the next ten years, says Mr. Mikhail Kosov of the Russian Economic University in Moscow, is high-skilled engineers in aerospace, machine-building and electronics. But also we’ll need mid-level technicians of all kinds, electricians for big factories, operators of robots… that kind of people.

Numerous government officials are saying that a complete overhaul of education is needed, with serious incentives for anyone willing to study things technical, not law or fine arts. One may expect results in maybe five years, when today’s first grade students start filling the multiple vacancies.

And in the meantime, foreign workforce may be very handy. So, the Russian government has, at the long last, turned its attention to the foreign workforce already in place. And the first result is deportation of the illegals.

Thing is, in the past Russia has adopted that disastrous European or American policy of importing low-skilled workforce, mostly from Central Asia, and not bothering with legal niceties. These people were mostly in construction, and also in city services, like driving taxis. But, as you can see, the needs of tomorrow’s economy will be quite different.

So, why did I mention these rather modest numbers of the Indian community in Russia? The simple reason is, this is exactly the kind of people our economy needs today, and will need tomorrow. Says Ms. Irina Baranova, head of a personnel-hiring company: those in Russia who tried to import the Indian workers, speak highly about them. We are simply talking about hi-class experts of middle levels, in between manual workers and engineers. Surveys of company managers show that Indian worker’s efficiency is sometimes four times (!) higher, than of the rest.

Finally, we are not just talking about the workforce of higher grade. In fact, in tomorrow’s economy it may be hard to draw a line between a laboratory researcher and an engineer, applying new ideas in a factory. So, says Vladimir Putin in the already mentioned speech, we fully recognize equitable and open international exchange in the scientific domain as one of the principal factors in fortifying a multipolar world. We will persist in advocating for the unification of efforts among researchers and engineers from Eastern and Southern nations to tackle large-scale experimental, theoretical, and, undoubtedly, practical challenges. Thus, the BRICS group, concluded the President, has effectively become a platform of global stature for social, economic, and technological development.