Greetings Subscribers:

You are invited to join us for this book launch online.

Speakers: Michael Tharakan and Priya Menon; Olle Tornquist will join them. Also, editors Ignatius Chithelen and Cherian Samuel.

Date: Thursday July 23, 2026

Time: 7 pm IST; 9.30 am US EST; 2.30 pm UK; 9.30 pm Singapore.

TO RSVP and get the link for the online chat KINDLY REGISTER VIA THIS LINK.

Kerala and Keralites: The Promises and Challenges is a collectiion of essays and interviews, first published in the Global Indian Times. They analyze the state’s major job creators: migrant work in the Persian Gulf, tourism and nursing education, and farming of coconuts and rubber. Also, included are profiles of economists and researchers, policy makers, business founders, CEOs, those in the arts, and Sanju Samson, a rare Keralite who is a leading cricketer.

P.K. Michael Tharakan is Chair, Centre for Socio-economic and Environmental Studies, Kerala. Earlier, he was the Vice Chancellor of Kannur University, Kerala.

Priya Menon is a Professor of English and Director, University Honors Program, at Troy University, Alabama, US. A Fulbright Scholar, she has written on migration, gender, and culture in Kerala, including the impact of Keralite migration to the Persian Gulf.

Olle Tornquist Professor, Political Science and Development Research, University of Oslo, Sweden. His research focuses on waves of democracy and develop;ment of rights. His field work has been in India, mainly Kerala, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Date: Thursday July 23, 2026

Time: 7 pm IST; 9.30 am US EST; 2.30 pm UK; 9.30 pm Singapore.

Duration: 90 minutes, including 30 minutes of audience questions.

TO RSVP AND RECEIVE THE VIDEO LINK KINDLY REGISTER VIA THIS LINK.

Profits, if any, from this book will be donated as copies of classic books in literature, science, economics, and other fields, to a public library in Kerala.

Pass along the invite to others who may be interested.

Regards

Ignatius Chithelen and Cherian Samuel, editors.

(The Book Cover design is by Visakh Menon, a New York artist. It is based on his painting series Tremors, Archival ink on xuan rice paper, 54x27 inches, 2019.)

(Photo: TP Sreenivasan, at an Education Conference, Kerala. All photos © Sree Sreenivasan.)

July 12, 2026

TP Sreenivasan is the Director General of the Kerala International Centre in Thiruvananthapuram. Earlier, while in the Indian Foreign Service, (IFS), he was Ambassador to the United Nations, New York, and Governor for India, at the International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna.

After retiring, TPS, as he is called, was the host of a weekly Malayalam television show on international affairs, Videsha Vicharam, which aired on Asianet News. He was Executive Head of the Kerala State Higher Education Council, 2011 to 2016, and a member of the National Security Advisory Board of the Government of India.

During his 37-year-career in the IFS, 1967 to 2004, his postings included Ambassador to Austria and Slovenia and Deputy Chief of Mission, Embassy of India, Washington DC. He also held postings in Kenya, Fiji, Thimphu, Moscow, and Yangon.

TPS, 82-years-old, started his career as the Third Secretary in the Embassy of India, Tokyo, 1969-71. While in Tokyo, he passed an advanced examination in Japanese with distinction. He also speaks Russian. An author of twelve books, he writes for the Asia Wall Street Journal, Times of India, Tribune, and Rediff.com.

He taught English for a year at Mar Ivanios College, after earning an MA and BA, in English, from University College, Thiruvananthapuram. Thettalil Parameswaran Pillai Sreenivasan, was born in Kayamkulam, Kerala.

In this Global Indian Times interview, while visiting New York in July 2026, TPS chats about his interest in education policies, life in the diplomatic service, how his command of English helped with the civil service exam and his foreign service career, and his writing, including finishing wife Chandralekha’s memoir.

Global Indian Times: What did you enjoy most as a diplomat?

Sreenivasan: Representing India, particularly at the United Nations. And the travel and meeting people in various countries.

Global Indian Times: Any not-so-good aspects of the work?

Sreenivasan: It is a challenge. You move from country to country every three years. Sometimes very interesting countries, very developed countries; sometimes very developing countries where there are difficulties. But it all evens out at the end.

Global Indian Times: The UN headquarters building (in New York) is behind you. What does it mean to you?

Sreenivasan: I spent about 20 years in the UN. New York twice. Also, in Uganda and Nairobi. And UN agencies in Geneva. The UN has been part of my life. I represented India at the UN for more years than most IFS officers.

I first came to the UN in New York in 1979, with India’s Foreign Minister for the Havana summit of the Non-Aligned Movement. I stayed at the UN Plaza Hotel, which is nearby. And I have spent enough days there to perhaps pay for the hotel itself.

Working at the UN, especially in New York, was a dream. It is very difficult to get the post. You have to be recognized as someone with special abilities.

Global Indian Times: You are also a devotee of Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace in the UK.

Sreenivasan: Shakespeare was part of my life during my academic career. I read and taught his books and acted in the staging of his plays. Knowing his works helped me excel at the civil service entrance exam. My dream of visiting Stratford-upon-Avon was fulfilled during our first family trip to the UK. It was an emotional experience.

Global Indian Times: You titled your first book, your autobiography Words, Words, Words.

Sreenivasan: In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when Polonius asks Hamlet, “What do you read, my lord?” Hamlet does not say a book or a document. He replies, “Words, words, words.” Words constitute the substance of communication. And in diplomacy, words are most important: spoken words, written words, and unspoken words. And long before I joined the Foreign Service, I decided, if I ever wrote a book, I would use Hamlet’s phrase as the title. But the publisher said the title would imply the book is on phonetics. So, we added the subtitle Adventures in Diplomacy.

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(Photo: TP Sreenivasan and wife Chandralekha, Kerala. 1960s. Photos © Sree Sreenivasan.)

Global Indian Times: You have been busy since retiring.

Sreenivasan: When I retired, I went back to Trivandrum. I wanted to start an academy to train Keralites for the Indian civil service exam. At that time, there was only the Kerala government academy. The Nair Service Society had a similar idea. They invited me to start the Civil Services Academy, which I ran for about 17 years. I helped at least 100 applicants get admission to the Indian civil and other services.

Global Indian Times: What led you to host a TV show on international relations in Malayalam?

Sreenivasan: It was another accident. I had known Dr. Raji Menon (founder of Asianet). He asked me to be the managing director of Asianet, since he was looking for someone who had international credibility. But there were various problems.

At his suggestion, in 2005, I launched Videsha Vicharam, a TV show on international affairs. It ran till 2020, when it was discontinued due to COVID. I then started a YouTube channel, TV with TPS. In 2023, Asianet invited me back and I hosted The Round and Aside.

Global Indian Times: Over 22 years, you have hosted more than a thousand episodes.

Sreenivasan: And then there are shows I do for Tamil, English, and other channels. They ask me about events happening anywhere in the world. Some events I may not even know about since they occurred while I was sleeping. When I say I have to first read about it, they say, “No, we’ll tell you what happened. Give us your reaction.”

Global Indian Times: you have also been involved in education policy in Kerala. Why?

Sreenivasan: In 2011, Chief Minister Mr. Oommen Chandy asked me to lead the Kerala Higher Education Council, a policy-making body. I asked why me, since I only taught a year in college and several Vice Chancellors wanted the post. He said, “I’m not looking for education experience—that we have. Since I am the Chief Minister, people ask me why are we stuck with an old pattern of education? Why can’t you improve it?” And then he added, “Since you know about universities around the world, especially in the United States, you may have some ideas to improve college education in Kerala.”

Along with colleagues, some of whom were Vice Chancellors, we prepared and submitted 16 reports. Our policy suggestions included privatizing colleges, offering them academic autonomy, allowing foreign universities to set up operations in Kerala, and setting up skills-based training programs. Some of them were implemented. Some of the difficult ones are pending.

Global Indian Times: You had an unusual experience as a policy maker.

Sreenivasan: All the states in India, except Kerala, have private universities. Amity University (a private university in India) asked me to explore setting up a private university in Trivandrum. I found it was a hard task because you need the laws changed. Amity gave up.

But Chief Minister Chandy knew of my attempt. We established a committee of former Vice Chancellors and provided a report to the government. But our recommendations were opposed by the left political parties, who were not in power. They campaigned saying I have come from the US and represent international interests. One former Vice Chancellor issued a statement that our reforms would commercialize, commoditize, and destroy Kerala’s education. The opponents ignored the fact that the UN itself recognizes education as a desirable business.

In 2016, I organized a Conference on Global Education. Attendees included 30 heads of US universities. It was held at the Vivanta hotel in Kovalam. When I got to the hotel entrance, I was stopped by a group of around 200 students.

Global Indian Times: You were pushed to the ground?

Sreenivasan: Yes, I fell down after being pushed. But I was not hurt. I got up, and, half an hour later, started the conference. The next day, most major newspapers in India, carried a picture of me, in a business suit, lying on the beach. Tourists at Kovalam can be found relaxing in various costumes. Not in a suit.

A few years later, the left parties were elected to power. Their government sought to implement some of our college reform proposals, though with amendments. It was passed by the Kerala legislature. But, for reasons I do not know, the state Governor is yet to sign it. One of the major goals of the new government (which took office in May 2026) is to reform education, including by attracting the best universities in the world to set up a campus in Kerala.

(Photo: TP Sreenivasan, center, and family on a New York City Subway. © Sree Sreenivasan.)

Global Indian Times: What does it feel like to hold the dozen books you have written?

Sreenivasan: It is a heavy weight, a record of what I did during 37 years in the Foreign Service and 20 years since. Each one is on a subject which is close to my heart, inspired by students, academics, publishers. The writing is always a pleasure. In fact, most of the writing was done while traveling in trains and planes.

Global Indian Times: Would you recommend a civil service career to a college student today?

Sreenivasan: Yes, absolutely. In fact, almost every good student in Kerala sits for the exams. There are some 28 exam preparation academies in Trivandrum alone, using online platforms and tools. They also attract candidates from other states. Some of them are run by my students who did get into the service.

But of course, the odds of being selected are very low. (Only about 0.2 percent of the more than one million candidates get selected.) This year, a girl from Kerala, who ranked 57th, was selected for the Foreign Service. She is from a very, shall we say, poor family. She was one of my students.

Global Indian Times: why is a civil service career attractive when a good student can make more money as an IIT engineer or in a management job?

Sreenivasan: When I joined the Foreign Service (in 1967), I had only two options: teaching or government service. So, the most desirable thing was to try and join the top levels of the civil service.

Today, even with more lucrative career options, the civil service continues to attract many IIT graduates. They find a glamour in running the government or representing India abroad.

Global Indian Times: would you have worked for the administrative or police service?

Sreenivasan: When I applied for the civil service exam, I listed foreign service as my first option, second IAS, and third IPS. But, after I passed the exam, the board of interviewers appeared to favor my joining the police service. That is their usual way of making candidates think they have been selected for the IPS. I spoke of my interest in international relations. I was ranked sixth among the 13 who were selected for the IFS.

Global Indian Times: Up until the 1980s, most who were selected for the top civil service jobs were students of economics, political science, or history. Did studying English hurt your chances?

Sreenivasan: It helped. Where you could not know the facts, you could fictionalize it. That was a great advantage of learning Shakespeare and other English literature. Also, since the exam was in English, it was a test of English knowledge. Later, in the Foreign Service, I found that appreciation of diplomatic notes depended on their literary quality.

Global Indian Times: How did you prepare for the civil service exam?

Sreenivasan: There were no training academies. Most of the preparation was done by seeking answers to questions in previous exams. And adopting learning strategies that helped previous candidates get selected.

But there was a magical tradition at University College. Each year, the student who ranked first in the English MA program, was selected for the civil service. So, when I was ranked first, everybody presumed that I would join the service—so it was kind of a natural move.

Even so, preparation for the exam was very hard. Apart from English literature, I had British history and Indian history as optional subjects. I did poorly in the Indian history exam because I had a superficial level of knowledge. I even thought of giving up on the exam and walking out. But I got a fairly high rank on the personality test, or interview, About 86%.

(Photo: TP Sreenivasan, UN Headquarters, New York. All photos © Sree Sreenivasan.)

Global Indian Times: you speak Japanese and Russian. Are you good at llanguages?

Sreenivasan: It was not out of choice. In the Foreign Service, you need to learn one language. It’s called compulsive and is allotted to you. When I joined, Japan was a prominent country, being a leading manufacturing hub. I stated Japanese as my first preference.

The disadvantage of Japanese is that it is a one-country language. If you learn French or Spanish or Russian, you can use it in several countries. Though I was not posted back to Japan, I was sent there several times to interpret for Prime Ministers and other Indian officials.

Global Indian Times: The Tokyo home of the Indian Ambassador must be a very special place.

Sreenivasan: Yes. It is a vast area, an old house, in a very prestigious location in Tokyo. After the Second World War, most of the war reparations India got from Japan were land and buildings. Although the buildings were old, the land was worth an immense amount. Sometimes I say that funds from the sale of properties owned in Japan, would have cleared all of India’s foreign debt. But we didn’t do such short-sighted things. We have very good accommodation for the Ambassador and Deputy Chief of Mission.

Global Indian Times: Are you disappointed you didn’t get posted as Ambassador to Japan?

Sreenivasan: Yes. But I had moved into multilateral diplomacy, where I was considered an expert. So, while I got several postings around the world, I was not considered for Japan

Global Indian Times: Who were your mentors? What did you learn from them?

Sreenivasan: University College was perhaps the best source for English studies, certainly starting from Hridayakumari to Santhakumari. They’re all part of my life. I spent five years as their student. They were inspiring and very encouraging.

Dr. Ayyappa Paniker, whom we thought did not know much English because of the way he spoke—very briefly with intervals to make us understand. Now I realize we did not understand him at all. He was probably the most scholarly, most creative, most outstanding modern poet in Malayalam.

Global Indian Times: Mentors in the service?

Sreenivasan: my first boss was Ambassador Haidar, who was the number two in Tokyo. It was part of his job to train the new officers. Next in Bhutan, my boss was Ambassador Gonsalves, a very decent, capable, charming. Also, very influential in the service.

Ambassador I.K. Gujral, in Moscow, gave me important administrative and political work. He also helped arrange school admissions for my children because he had so much influence in Delhi. While a Head of Mission myself, I got support in Delhi from K.P.S. Menon. One time, I was on my way to Oman. Ambassador Venkateswaran said, “Why are you going to Oman? There’s nothing to do there.” So, he sent me to Fiji, and that became prophetic. I stood up for the local Indian community on the island, under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s guidance. I was expelled from Fiji.

Global Indian Times: what is your advice as a mentor?

Sreenivasan: First, master English, spoken and written. Then read newspapers. Till I went to college, I read all the pages of The Hindu newspaper. At my father’s direction. That was really the education I got. In my village, the paper was delivered in the evening.

Global Indian Times: how did you adjust to strange, foreign situations every three years?

Sreenivasan: It is a physical, mental, financial challenge. Also, highly stressful. The casualty rate in the Foreign Service is next only to that in the armed forces. You forget yourself. The temptations are too many and difficult to resist. And alcohol is a big issue. You’re paid to drink, serve it, and gift it.

Global Indian Times: You took over and finished wife Chandralekha’s book.

Sreenivasan: It is her memoirs. While we worked together on it, it is her work. She spent the last two years of her life on the book but could not complete it. Soon after her passing, I finished the book. As per her wish, it was released by Kerala’s Governor.

Chandralekha’s book is part of a new genre. Wives of Foreign Service officers are writing about their own career. They play a significant role in a diplomat’s life, which many people don’t know. That is why my wife called it The Better Half of Diplomacy. I agree. Spouses face far more challenges without any training.

This interview will be part of the book, Kerala and Keralites: The Promise and Challenges. The book is a collection of essays and interviews from the Global Indian Times, edited by Ignatius Chithelen and Cherian Samuel. Bryant Park Publishers. Publication: July 24, 2026.

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(Book cover: design by Visaskh Menon, based on his painting series Tremors, archival ink on xuan rice paper, 2018-2021.)

By Paul Kattuman

July 11, 2026

This podcast is based on Paul Kattuman’s foreword for the book, Kerala and Keralites: The Promise and Challenges, to be published in July 2026. Kattuman is Professor of Economics at Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge.

Extracts from the foreword

The central concern of this volume is a conversion problem. Kerala created a capable and aspirational society, but it has not always created the institutions or economic conditions in which those capabilities can be fully used. This is why the same achievement returns in the book as a difficulty: education without enough suitable work, migration without adequate protection for migrants, welfare without an assured fiscal base, and women’s advancement without corresponding power in the economy and public life.

Kerala’s achievements were produced by social pressure. Communities, especially those denied status, wanted education because it brought dignity, mobility, employment, and bargaining power. State schooling, social movements, labour politics, and electoral mobilisation helped create a culture in which literacy and health became expectations.

Kerala’s achievements in female literacy, health, and education do not by themselves amount to economic power. Women’s autonomy through work is shaped just as much by everyday conditions of freedom, such as safety in movement and a fairer distribution of care within families.

The chapters in this volume approach Kerala’s development from different angles, but a common theme runs through them. They ask us to look at Kerala plainly: as a society of real achievements and serious contradictions. The Kerala Question is no longer whether human development matters. It is whether Kerala can turn human development into secure livelihoods, greater autonomy for women, environmental security, and a future that more people can imagine within Kerala itself.

Paul Kattuman is Professor of Economics at Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, and Director of Studies in Management and Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His research focuses on econometric methods and applied modelling, especially in public health, the space economy, and the Indian economy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he worked with Andrew Harvey, Professor of Econometrics in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge, to develop time-series models for tracking and forecasting epidemic trajectories as they evolved over time. This work contributed to operational forecasting in the UK and India, particularly Kerala. He is an Associate Editor of the Harvard Data Science Review and is affiliated with the Centre for India and Global Business and the Space Economy Initiative, both at Cambridge Judge Business School. Paul holds a BA and MA from the University of Calicut, Kerala, and an MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge, all in economics.

This interview will be part of the book, Kerala and Keralites: The Promise and Challenges. The book is a collection of essays and interviews from the Global Indian Times, edited by Ignatius Chithelen and Cherian Samuel. Bryant Park Publishers. Publication: July 24, 2026.

(Book cover: design by Visaskh Menon, based on his painting series Tremors, archival ink on xuan rice paper, 2018-2021.)

By Paul Kattuman

July 11, 2026

This essay is based on Paul Kattuman’s foreword for the book, Kerala and Keralites: The Promise and Challenges, to be published in July 2026. Kattuman is Professor of Economics at Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge.

Kerala has often been described as a paradox, and with reason. It occupies a place in India’s imagination far larger than its size. Its achievements in literacy, health, social reform, and public action are real. So too are its unresolved difficulties: too few well-paid jobs for educated young people, long dependence on migration, fiscal strain, environmental stress, and a persistent gap between aspiration and opportunity.

The familiar discussion of the ‘Kerala Model’ has focused on how a relatively low-income state achieved remarkably high levels of literacy, life expectancy, and social development. That was the question to which the ideas underpinning the Kerala Model offered an answer. A follow-up question now presses itself upon Kerala: can a society that achieved broad social development convert it into productive work, gender equality, ecological wellbeing and, not least, opportunity at home?

A wide-ranging body of essays, interviews, profiles, and reflections published in Global Indian Times helps us think about that question. Read together, these pieces point to a conversion problem. Kerala widened human capabilities on a broad front, but it has not always created the institutions or economic conditions in which those capabilities can be fully used. The tensions are familiar: education without enough suitable work, migration without adequate protection, welfare without an assured fiscal base, and women’s advancement without corresponding power in the economy and public life.

The articles also suggest that Kerala is best understood as a globally connected society whose boundaries extend beyond the state itself. There is the Kerala of land, institutions, and public policy; the Kerala of families, language, memory, and community life; and the wider Kerala sustained by migrants, remittances, care networks, business ties, and cultural identity.

The story of Kerala is also the story of dispersed people. A worker in the Gulf, a nurse in Europe, a student in Bengaluru, a returnee in Kochi, and an ageing parent in Kottayam are all part of this wider Kerala. Their lives are connected by remittances, care, obligation, memory, and the uneven consequences of migration. Across these different worlds, one question recurs: what can Kerala do to make room for the capabilities its people have acquired?

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How Kerala’s achievements were moulded

Kerala’s public image is often cast in terms that are too simple. It is praised as India’s most literate state, a haven of social development, a broadly left-led welfare success, a land of migrant remittances, and a place of relative communal coexistence. All these descriptions contain some truth, but they are by no means the whole truth.

In the Global Indian Times interview Why Kerala Has Higher Literacy and Better Healthcare, P.K. Michael Tharakan resists simple origin stories. Kerala’s high literacy and health indicators did not arise solely from benevolent rulers, missionary education, or modern political mobilisation. They emerged through long processes of change in agriculture and trade, social groups seeking new opportunities, challenges to caste hierarchy, and growing popular demand for education and public institutions. Kerala’s social development was demanded, fought for, and negotiated over time.

In other words, Kerala’s achievements were produced by social pressure. Communities, especially those denied status, wanted education because it brought dignity, mobility, employment, and bargaining power. State schooling, social movements, labour politics, and electoral mobilisation helped create a culture in which literacy and health became expectations.

Writing in Global Indian Times, K.P. Kannan gives this history its sharpest formulation: What Accounts for Kerala’s Spectacular Economic Success and Failures. His description of ‘spectacular successes along with spectacular failures’ captures the record of a highly mobilised society. Public action helped produce literacy, welfare, wages, and accountability. It also left the state and its institutions to mediate strong, competing claims over public finance, land, labour, and political power. The question is whether disagreement can be turned into legitimate decisions and practical compromises.

A Global Indian Times interview with Tirthankar Roy offers a useful corrective to accounts that see only stagnation. Roy argues that Kerala’s recent economic revival has been underestimated. He points to private investment and new businesses in tourism, specialist health care, information technology, manufacturing, and exports. The test is whether these successes can become broad enough to improve the employment prospects of educated people, reduce the pressure to migrate, and strengthen state revenues without deepening ecological strain. Economic growth in Kerala cannot be treated as a purely technical matter. The choices are difficult, and they must pass through politics.

(Photo: students. Courtesy Government College of Nursing, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.)

Migration, work, and gender

The essays and interviews on migration and the Arabian Gulf show the urgency of these questions. For more than half a century, migration has been one of Kerala’s most consequential development pathways. It was not designed by a planning body, yet it transformed the state more powerfully than many formal plans. Keralites left for the Gulf and then for countries across the world. Their remittances built houses, educated children, supported parents, expanded consumption, and helped fuel the growth of construction, finance, private education, and health care.

Migration has also carried pain. Cherian Samuel’s account of Indian workers in the Middle East asks whether the Gulf dream can become a nightmare. The answer is clearly yes. Migration can bring income and, in many cases, dignity; it can also bring debt, unsafe work, wage theft, and family separation. Migrant workers are welcomed as economic contributors when money comes home but are too often left alone when the costs of migration become visible. A Global Indian Times reflection on The Goat Life brings those costs into view. A society that depends on migration must treat migrant protection and reintegration as fundamental development questions.

That obligation cannot run in only one direction. Kerala itself depends heavily on workers who have migrated from other Indian states. A credible ethic of migrant protection must extend to them as well as to Keralites working elsewhere.

Sunil Mani’s essay Why Rising Foreign Demand for Nurses Benefits Keralite Women gives migration a crucial gender dimension. Kerala’s investments in education and health helped produce generations of women whose skills are valued around the world. Foreign demand for nurses can open paths to higher income, professional advancement, and independence. Migration is therefore not simply evidence of local failure. International differences in wages, working conditions, and career prospects also matter.

Yet nursing raises a harder question: why must so many highly trained women leave the state to find well-paid work? Why does educated female unemployment remain so high in a society proud of women’s education? Nursing captures one of Kerala’s central gender contradictions. Women’s skills are valued across the world, and their work is indispensable at home, but Kerala still offers too few attractive opportunities for them to work, earn, and make decisions with freedom.

Female literacy, health, and education do not by themselves amount to economic power. Women’s autonomy through work is shaped just as much by everyday conditions of freedom: safety of movement, access to suitable employment, and a fairer distribution of care within families.

Enterprise, technology, and agriculture

The business profiles published in Global Indian Times reveal another kind of mobility: the movement of talent, managerial expertise, and entrepreneurial ambition. They show how people from Kerala and the wider Malayali diaspora have built significant firms and institutions in education, health care, food, technology, and consumer markets.

Kerala’s human capital travels well. Why does more of it not find adequate room within the state? An executive in a global corporation, a nurse in a foreign hospital, an entrepreneur in the Gulf, a small-business founder in an Indian city—what would allow such capabilities to flourish in Kerala? Sunil Mani addresses this directly in Can Kerala Become India’s Next High-Technology Hub. Kerala has an educated workforce, diaspora links, and the social foundations of a knowledge economy. High-technology growth, however, needs more: capital, research networks, regulatory clarity, and a labour environment in which rights and productivity can be reconciled.

Related questions arise in the Global Indian Times essays on agriculture and cash crops. Kerala’s links with the wider world through crops and trade long predate Gulf migration and software. Coconut, rubber, spices, coffee, and shrimp continue to connect producers in Kerala with distant markets, but those connections are fragile.

Coconut cultivation is under pressure from low returns and labour shortages. Rubber growers face imports, volatile prices, and the limits of smallholder production. Spices retain enormous cultural and commercial value, but Kerala cannot rely on a romantic reputation inherited from the past. It must deepen its movement towards quality, branding, and premium markets. Coffee and shrimp point to both the opportunities and the vulnerabilities of global value chains.

Agriculture is one of the places where Kerala’s future will be decided. The reorganisation of cultivation will shape rural livelihoods, food resilience, and the state’s ecological future. Where cultivation is progressively displaced by real estate and remittance-funded consumption, knowledge, landscape, and memory risk being lost. If farming can be made more valuable to those who cultivate, while respecting ecological limits, it can remain a serious part of Kerala’s future.

(Photo: A coconut tree climber. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

Culture, democracy, ageing, and climate

The cultural and biographical pieces in Global Indian Times widen the meaning of development. They remind us that Kerala’s promise includes intellectual and cultural life. The essays and reflections on K.N. Raj, founder of the Centre for Development Studies, place him at the intellectual heart of modern Kerala. His importance lies not only in Indian planning and the creation of CDS, but also in the kind of inquiry he encouraged: one that took evidence seriously, understood history, and kept ordinary people within the frame of analysis.

Sunil Mani’s Inspiring Achievements of Keralite Women in Science and Technology might initially appear to sit outside a discussion of development. It belongs within it because Kerala’s promises must ultimately be judged by what they make possible in individual lives. The achievements of Janaki Ammal, Anna Mani, T.K. Radha, and Tessy Thomas show people making lives that earlier generations might not have thought possible. They also carry a caution: exceptional achievement should not be mistaken for equal access. The question remains whether such success can become ordinary rather than remarkable.

The essays on democracy, minority rights, and public debate also belong at the centre of Kerala’s development story. Its achievements have always depended on a noisy and argumentative public sphere in which ordinary people expected to speak and be heard. That is a proud inheritance, but one that needs renewal. A literate society can still constrict dissent. A politically mobilised society can still fail to protect minority and dissenting voices. A society proud of public argument can still treat disagreement as disloyalty. Democratic speech is how a society discovers where it is failing and what it must repair.

In the Global Indian Times interview Mathew Cherian’s Journey from Engineering to Caring for India’s Elderly, Cherian Samuel discusses questions that are especially relevant to Kerala, which is ageing faster than much of India. Migration has changed family structures, and many adult children live abroad or elsewhere in India. Kerala’s success in extending life expectancy now requires arrangements through which old age is not marked by insecurity and loneliness. This too is a gender question, because eldercare often falls on women whose work remains hidden in household accounts and public budgets.

In the Global Indian Times interview India Risks Major Climate Disasters Says Vinod Thomas, Thomas places Kerala within a larger national and global frame. Kerala is not a coal-producing state, but national energy choices and global warming bear directly on its exposure to climate shocks. Climate resilience cannot consist only of emergency action after floods and landslides. It must shape decisions about where Kerala builds, how it protects fragile land, and how public investment is justified.

The next Kerala Model

A central argument emerges from these varied contributions. Kerala’s old strengths remain real, but they are not enough. The next Kerala Model must grow from the first while confronting what the first left unresolved. The first model widened human capability; the next must carry that capability into work, autonomy, ecological security, and opportunity at home.

Education must lead to work consistent with people’s aspirations. Migration must become less a necessity imposed by limited opportunity and more a protected choice. Kerala must make it possible for more people to imagine a future with dignity within the state. That requires institutions through which migrant savings can find productive uses and returning migrants’ skills and experience can be put to work. It also requires an economy that gives people confidence to take risks, build enterprises, and remain connected to Kerala whether they live within it or elsewhere.

Read together, the essays, interviews, profiles, and reflections published in Global Indian Times ask us to look at Kerala plainly: as a society of real achievements and serious contradictions. The Kerala Question is no longer whether human development matters. It is whether Kerala can turn human development into secure livelihoods, greater autonomy for women, environmental security, and a future that more people can imagine within Kerala itself.

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A personal map of Kerala

These questions are personal to me. I was born and raised in Kerala, but it was at Sainik School, Trivandrum, which I joined when I was ten, that my sense of the state widened beyond my own town. The school’s deepest gift was friendship. My classmates came from villages and towns across Kerala, from Kasaragod to Thiruvananthapuram. Through them, Kerala ceased to be just the place I was from and became a larger, more varied social world—many accents, backgrounds, beliefs, and local worlds, all made memorable through the daily revelry of friendship.

Decades later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, one of those school friends, Rajeev Sadanandan, brought me into Kerala’s public health response. Rajeev, who as Additional Chief Secretary for Health had helped guide the state through the Nipah outbreak and was then adviser to the Chief Minister, asked me to contribute district-level infection forecasts. Week after week, I did that work from my Cambridge office. In technical terms, it involved statistical estimation under uncertainty. But no district was ever merely a unit in a dataset. Each name summoned a friend, a family known through years of stories, and a village I felt I knew despite never having lived there. The map I was studying was also, inescapably, a map of friendship and memory.

That experience continues to shape how I think about Kerala and the questions raised by these Global Indian Times contributions. It reminds me that the Kerala Model is ultimately an account of people’s lives and of the institutions that open or close possibilities. My personal map of Kerala still shapes the questions I ask: whether public policy reaches ordinary lives, whether institutions can respond to old and new pressures, and whether Kerala can build on its achievements without mistaking them for guarantees. These questions concern the future people will be able to build in Kerala—and their ability to remain part of Kerala’s future wherever they live.

This interview will be part of the book, Kerala and Keralites: The Promise and Challenges. The book is a collection of essays and interviews from the Global Indian Times, edited by Ignatius Chithelen and Cherian Samuel. Bryant Park Publishers. Publication: July 24, 2026.

About the author

Paul Kattuman is Professor of Economics at Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, and Director of Studies in Management and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. His research focuses on econometric methods and applied modelling, particularly in public health, the space economy, and the Indian economy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, his work with Andrew Harvey contributed to operational forecasting in the UK and India, particularly Kerala. He is an Associate Editor of the Harvard Data Science Review, is affiliated with the Centre for India and Global Business, and serves as Academic Advisor to the Space Economy Initiative at Cambridge Judge Business School.

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(Photo: Vinod Jose, courtesy Wayanad Literary Festival.)

February 7, 2026

Part of the mission of St. Thomas College is “To empower the students with deep knowledge and awareness of current developments in their chosen subject of study.” Also, given accomplished alumni and past speakers, the college management’s decision to cancel Vinod Jose’s lecture, which was presumably backed by officials of the Catholic Church, will hurt the college’s reputation.

February 6, 2026

In 2021, Vinod Jose, accepted the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism from Nieman Fellows at Harvard University. The award was given to The Caravan, a New Delhi-based magazine of which Jose was then Executive Editor, “in recognition of its reporting on the erosion of human rights, social justice, and democracy in India.”

Speaking at the award ceremony, Jose said, “Christians are randomly being picked up — nuns harassed…Priests and missionaries being attacked. Every religious minority” and lower castes are targeted in India.

In 2025, there were nearly 900 attacks on Christians in India, according to Christian Solidarity International, “continuing a five-year surge in attacks that intensified during the Christmas season.”

The attacks are carried out by Hindu extremists reportedly belonging to groups affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which rules India with Narendra Modi as Prime Minister. The “prime minister hasn’t said a word against the Hindu radicals who attacked Christians,” notes a columnist in The Wall Street Journal.

One of the attacks in 2025 was in Kerala, where a man from the RSS attacked “a group of children under 15,” damaging their musical instruments during a Christmas carol performance. So, it is odd that, this week, the St. Thomas College, run by the Catholic Church in Palai, Kerala, cancelled Jose’s lecture on the State of Indian Democracy.

“Funnily enough, with the disinvitation,” Jose notes in a social media post, “the lecture has already been delivered, without me uttering a word. The state of Indian democracy stands explained.” Jose learnt about the cancellation, for being a “controversial figure,” from a fellow speaker and not from the college management.

Vinod K Jose was the Executive Editor of The Caravan, New Delhi, from 2009 to 2023. Under him, the magazine exposed numerous corruption scandals in India; many involving governments of BJP’s Narendra Modi as well as former Congress Party Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

“The Caravan has persistently spoken truth to power while documenting the rise of political Hinduism in the country over the past decade,” the Nieman Fellows noted. “Risking violence and imprisonment, its reporters have written an essential series of investigations into Hindu supremacist terrorism, political murder, caste and gender injustice, and ethnic violence against India’s Muslim minority. The Caravan has repeatedly demonstrated that it represents a beacon of moral clarity in Indian public life.”

In 2021, there were ten judicial cases outstanding against Jose and the publisher of Caravan, in five states where the administration and “the police report directly to Prime Minister Modi,” Jose said while speaking at Harvard. The magazine also faced multi-million-dollar legal threats from a major company with close ties to the government. He added, “A small publication like us will be worried whether we will be run out of business, whether they will send us to jail.”

At Caravan, Jose noted, the journalists were extremely lucky to have an owner who gave “us a lot of freedom,” despite financial, legal and other threats, unlike at most major media companies in India. Also, the magazine has a large, growing number of subscribers which provides financial independence and stability.

Caravan was founded in 1939 by Vishwa Nath, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi who was then leading India’s struggle for freedom from British rule. Now it is published by the Delhi Press Group, run by Nath’s grandson Anant Nath. The group publishes 33 magazines in English and nine Indian languages.

(Photo: Vinod Jose, courtesy Wayanad Literary Festival.)

In 2008, Jose worked as a producer in South Asia for Pacifica Radio. From 2002 to 2007, he was a freelance radio producer, including for BBC and NPR. He started his career as a reporter for The Indian Express, Delhi, in 2001. From 1997 to 2001, while a student, as a freelancer, he reported stories for Udayavani, a Kannada publication, and wrote features for Malayalam newspapers Mathrubhumi and Malayala Manorama.

Vinod Kizhakkeparambil Joseph, 46-years-old, is the director of the Wayanad Literary Festival, Kerala; it is next scheduled to be held in December 2026. He was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University School of Advanced Study, 2021-2022. Jose earned a PhD in sociology from Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, 2011; an MS from the School of Journalism, Columbia University, New York, 2008; an MS in communications from Manipal University, India, 2001; and a BA in English from Mary Matha Arts & Science College, Wayanad, Kerala, 2000. He grew up in Wayanad.

Part of the mission of St. Thomas College is “To empower the students with deep knowledge and awareness of current developments in their chosen subject of study.” The college, which was founded in 1950, offers 18 undergraduate and 15 postgraduate programs and ten research departments. It has nearly 2,900 students and 151 faculty members. Alumni include K. G. Balakrishnan, former Chief Justice of India, Tom Jose, the current Chief Secretary of Kerala, and Siby George, India’s former ambassador to Switzerland, Vatican and Liechtenstein. Past speakers at the college include Nobel Laureates Ada E. Yonath, chemistry, 2009, and Klaus von Klitzing, physics, 1985.

Given accomplished alumni and past speakers, the college management’s decision to cancel Jose’s lecture, which was presumably backed by officials of the Catholic Church, will hurt the college’s reputation. Sibi James, head of St. Thomas College, did not respond to questions from The Wire. Sources familiar with the management told the publication that Jose’s lecture could have resulted in Modi’s Government blocking the college from receiving foreign donations.

In his post, Jose implies that his lecture may have been cancelled because, “If not all, at least a section of the Christian society in Kerala are tiptoeing the RSS-BJP line of blocking relevant, transparent conversations at the least, and at its maximum, working to help the Hindu right get a foothold in Kerala.”

Story updated February 7, 2026

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(Photo: dance, Kerala, courtesy Wikimedia.)

By Sunil Mani

Sunil Mani is a visiting professor, Centre for Development Studies, and Ahmedabad University, both in India. The views expressed are personal.

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EXTRACTS

Over centuries, Keralites have advanced the use of Ayurvedic and other nature-based remedies to treat back and joint pain, allergies, diabetes, insomnia, stress and other ailments. They grow jackfruits, mangoes, pineapples, cashews, and other fruits. A long tradition of cooking offers toddy-appams, coconut-based fish and meat curries, payasams and halvas. Visitors are entertained with Kathakali, Mohiniyattam, Theyyam, Kalaripayattu, and other dances and cultural attractions.

Not surprising then, that, tourism and medical tourism are an important pillar of Kerala’s economy. It is one of the state’s largest employers, generates thousands of small and several big entrepreneurs, contributes significantly to a more balanced economic development across the state, and earns foreign exchange for India.

However, Kerala’s tourism industry faces major challenges. They include congested roads, impact of climate-change, and, most important, competition from Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Maldives.

Up until a decade ago, Kerala was far cheaper for foreign tourists. In 2026, the total costs for a ten-day trip, for a British or American couple, to Kerala, Vietnam and Sri Lanka are roughly the same.

Travel to Kerala is becoming more expensive due to higher costs, especially of unskilled labor and real estate. Daily wage rates in Kerala are among the highest in India. It is being driven up by a combination of powerful labor unions and a highly educated workforce, which avoids manual labor. Ironically, Kerala, which exports labor to the Persian Gulf countries, imports unskilled labor - around three million - from the poorer regions of Bihar, West Bengal, and other Indian states.

Then, demand for homes and other real estate in Kerala keeps rising, from relatively affluent Keralites working outside the state, especially those in the Persian Gulf countries. This has sharply boosted prices of land and construction costs.

There is then climate-related risks, though this also applies to competing tropical tourist destinations. In 2019, for instance, the summer and monsoon tourism business, across much of Kerala, was severely hurt by heavy rain, floods, and landslides. There was also a highly publicized outbreak of the Nipah virus and fears of flood-related communicable diseases, particularly leptospirosis (rat fever), dengue fever, influenza, and hepatitis A.

Given the challenges, entrepreneurs, officials, and policy makers in Kerala must recognize that the state’s advantages in tourism needs to be nurtured and strengthened, or it can evaporate quickly. There are no compelling reasons for foreign tourists to spend their money in Kerala. Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Maldives also offer beaches, forests, and birding, good food, and massages, yoga, and other nature-based wellness treatments.

The example of the cashew industry in Kerala offers a good lesson. In the mid-1990s, Vietnamese delegations visited Kollam to learn about Kerala’s cashew nut processing operations. By 2006, using automation and favourable government labor and other policies, Vietnam overtook India as the leading exporter of cashew nuts. Meanwhile, Kerala’s cashew agro-industry was unable to cut costs and improve quality, severely damaging the state’s centuries-old dominance in the global supply of the nuts.

Unlike Vietnam and Sri Lanka, Kerala offers a rare blend of ancient, proven Ayurveda-based medical services and numerous leisure attractions. Will Kerala’s advantage soon disappear due to complacency and neglect or since it is being copied by rivals? Or, will those in Kerala’s tourism business focus on improving quality and services and lowering costs, thereby continuing to attract more foreign tourists?

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This essay will be part of the book, Kerala and Keralites: The Promise and Challenges. The book is a collection of essays and interviews from the Global Indian Times, edited by Ignatius Chithelen and Cherian Samuel. Bryant Park Publishers. Publication date July 2026.

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(Photo: an Ayurveda resort in Kerala, courtesy Wikimedia.)

By Sunil Mani

July 4, 2026

As a Keralite, I view Kerala as God’s Own Country.

Blessed by nature, the state offers a wide range of choices for fun and relaxation. Kovalam, Varkala, Bekal, Marari, and other beaches, along the Arabian Sea coast, which stretches over 600 kilometres, 375 miles. Houseboats plying on the backwaters, an interconnected network of lagoons, lakes, rivers, and canals, especially in Alappuzha and Kumarakom. Miles of trails for trekking in the hill-stations of Munnar, Thekkady, and Wayanad, in the Western Ghats. Protected forests like the Periyar Tiger Reserve and Eravikulam and Silent Valley National Parks. In the forests and hill stations you may see elephants, bison, deer, and other wildlife and hornbills, kingfishers, orioles, and other birds.

Kerala also has the Thrissur and other Hindu temple festivals, major Christian pilgrimage centres such as Malayattoor, Bharananganam, Edappally, Vallarpadam, and Arthunkal, as well as colonial and Jewish sites in Fort Kochi.

In turn, over centuries, Keralites have advanced the use of Ayurvedic and other nature-based remedies to treat back and joint pain, allergies, diabetes, insomnia, stress and other ailments. They grow jackfruits, mangoes, pineapples, cashews, and other fruits. A long tradition of cooking offers toddy-appams, coconut-based fish and meat curries, payasams and halvas. Visitors are entertained with Kathakali, Mohiniyattam, Theyyam, Kalaripayattu, and other dances and cultural attractions.

Not surprising then, that, tourism and medical tourism are an important pillar of Kerala’s economy. It is one of the state’s largest employers, generates thousands of small and several big entrepreneurs, contributes significantly to a more balanced economic development across the state, and earns foreign exchange for India.

Kerala is popular with tourists from India as well as abroad. Domestic visitors rose to 25 million in 2025, exceeding the pre-Covid 19 pandemic record of 18 million. More than two-thirds of the domestic tourists are from within Kerala. They are a mix of day travellers and those renting overnight rooms, during weekends, school holidays, and Onam and other festivals.

The rest of the domestic tourists are mainly from the neighbouring southern states, especially Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, and some from the other states. Visitors from neighbouring states typically spend two to three nights in Kerala, while those travelling from more distant parts of India stay four to seven nights.

Most foreign tourists stay longer, often one to two weeks, especially those combining Ayurveda treatments with leisure travel. In 2025, foreign tourist arrivals were 822,000, about a quarter below the pre-pandemic peak.

Kerala’s attraction has grown rapidly since the 1990s. In 1999, foreign visitors were around 200,000, up more than three-fold from 1990. Domestic tourists were around five million in 1999, up more than five-fold from 1990.

In 2025, Kerala’s total revenues from domestic and foreign tourists were an estimated Rupees 50,702 crores, US $5.4 billion. This was about four percent of the state’s Gross Domestic Product. The revenues are up 120-fold from 1999, in Rupees, in large part due to spending by foreign tourists and the depreciating Rupee. In 2025, while foreign tourists were only around three percent of arrivals, they accounted for nearly a sixth of the state’s tourism revenues.

Foreign tourist arrivals are seasonal, starting in November and extending until March. Among domestic tourists, there is big demand, especially for Kerala’s hill stations and beaches, during the summer school holidays in April and May. There is a second peak in domestic tourists from September to January.

The British account for nearly a sixth of Kerala’s foreign tourists, followed closely by Americans. The state also attracts tourists from Germany, France, Malaysia and Australia. In recent years, Arab tourists, mainly from Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, account for nearly a fifth of foreign tourists. A substantial proportion of foreign visitors are non-resident Indians, particularly Keralites, returning to visit family and friends as well as for leisure and medical care.

Idukki district, where Munnar and Thekkady are located, attracts nearly a fifth of domestic tourists. Other popular destinations are Ernakulam, with Kochi and Fort Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram, with Kovalam beach, and Thrissur, home to the Guruvayoor temple. These four districts account for more than two-thirds of domestic tourist visits to Kerala. These districts are also popular among foreign tourists, though Ernakulam attracts more than a third of them.

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(Photo: dance, Kerala, courtesy Wikimedia.)

The Government of India has liberalized visa regulations, including offering visas-on-arrival to citizens of Japan, South Korea, and the UAE. Each week, during the peak tourist season, roughly 700 to 800 direct international flights arrive at the Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram, Kozhikode, and Kannur airports. The Kochi airport handles nearly half of them. The flights mostly originate in Dubai and other Gulf countries. In addition to tourists, the four airports serve Keralite expatriate laborers traveling to and from the Gulf. This has sharply reduced the cheating and robbing of many of these laborers which previously occured at the Mumbai airport.

Kerala has more than 4,000 government-approved tourist accommodations, with an estimated 70,000 rooms. They include hotels, resorts, villas, houseboats, and guest houses. Hotels, catering mainly to foreign tourists and affluent Indians, have around 10,000 rooms. They range from upscale Hyatt, Le Meridien and Taj hotels, to mid-price Crowne Plaza, and Ramada, and budget hotels, including those run by local entrepreneurs, like the Abad Hotels. Kerala also has around 9,000 licensed Airbnb and other similar short-term home and room rentals.

Prices vary depending on facilities, location, and season. In 2026, off-season daily room rates at the Grand Hyatt in Kochi started from Rupees 17,000, $170. Rates at the Kerala Government run KTDC-Bolgatty Palace & Island Resort, in Kochi, ranged from Rupees 4,000 to 6,500, $40 to $65. Mid-range resorts such as Golden Peak at Ponmudi charged Rupees 2,200 to 6,500, $22 to $65. Guest houses and Airbnb rooms were available for Rupees 800 to 3,000, $8 to $30, per night. During the monsoon season, June to September, tourists can get discounts of 20 to 50 per cent.

While the monsoon months are off-season for leisure travel, they are peak season for medical tourism. Kerala is by far India’s leading destination for such tourists. Ayurveda facilities offer Panchakarma, a five-part cleansing and detoxification treatment, physical rehabilitation and stress-reduction therapies, oil-massages, yoga, and meditation.

Each year, Kerala attracts several hundred thousand visitors primarily for medical and wellness treatment. They are foreigners, non-resident Indians, including those returning from the Persian Gulf countries, and affluent Indians. Most of the foreigners are from Germany, France, Switzerland and the UK. In 2024, medical tourism in Kerala generated an estimated Rupees 13,500 crores, $1.4 billion, in revenue.

Kerala has one of the largest number of nature-based medical professionals in the world. They include some whose families have practiced Ayurveda for generations. Also, each year, the state’s twelve Ayurveda medical colleges graduate around 700 practitioners as well as post-graduate specialists. Government and private colleges annually train hundreds of Ayurveda nurses and therapists.

Ayurvedic traditions include formulating medicines, using herbs and spices, which are found locally. So, there are thousands of pharmacists, medicinal-plant cultivators, and researchers, including those working in hospitals, teaching institutions and pharmaceutical companies.

The state has more than 900 government-accredited Ayurveda hospitals, treatment centres and resorts. They offer an estimated 9,000 treatment and accommodation beds, ranging from internationally renowned medical resorts to small physician-run centres.

The luxury Somatheeram Ayurvedic Health Resort is located near Kovalam. During the 2026 Monsoon season, daily rates ranged from US $134 for a cottage, for two adults, to $272 for a deluxe suite for three adults. Rates are higher during the peak tourist season, December to March. Packages, which include rooms, meals and choice of thirty different Ayurvedic treatments, are higher in price. The prices though are not listed on the site, with potential guests having to seek a quote by email.

The resott, which caters primarily to German and other western guests, is run by a German-Indian management team. Bookings can only be made through its website and office and via “expert partners.” Since the founder Polly Mathew passed away in 2015, his sons and wife Tresa Arampankudy manage the business.

Nearby, there is Somatheeram Ayurveda Village run by Baby Mathew, the brother of Polly Mathew. During the Monsoon season, daily rates range from $75 to $250. The village offers reservations through Expedia and other travel sites. The Mathew brothers, who founded the original Somatheeram, split in 2006.

Kerala has budget ayurveda hospitals and wellness centres, some operated by charitable trusts and physician-owned clinics. They charge Rupees 2,500 to 5,000, $25 to $50, per night, during the monsoon season, and, Rupees 3,500 to 6,500, $35 to $65, during the peak season. The rates at some of the facilities include accommodation, meals, doctor’s consultations and one or two daily treatments.

Kerala also has internationally accredited, multi-specialty hospitals These include the VPS Lakeshore Hospital, Ernakulam and Kochi, Aster MIMS Hospital, Kozhikode, and Amrita Hospital, Ernakulam. They offer heart surgeries, organ transplants and other modern allopathic care. The hospitals mainly attract patients from the Persian Gulf, including non-resident Indians.

Tourism in Kerala, as in other places, generates demand for taxis, food, retail stores, handicrafts, construction, and other businesses. Using data from an earlier study, it is estimated that tourism and related businesses provide roughly 1.6 million jobs in Kerala. This accounts for nearly a quarter of the state’s total formal and informal employment. In Idukki, Ernakulam, Alappuzha, and Wayanad districts, tourism has reduced dependence on traditional agricultural jobs.

(Photo: boat race Kochi, Kerala, courtesy Wikimedia.)

Tourism has boosted entrepreneurship in Kerala in a number of related businesses. There are private owners of hotel chains such as Abad Hotels, CGH Earth, Casino Group, and Raviz Hotels. Room rates at Abad, a chain of 16 hotels and two premium houseboats, ranged from Rupees 4,500 to 6,500, $45 to $65, during the 2026 peak season; and Rupees 3,000 to 4,500, $30 to $45, during the off-season.

Abad Hotels is part of the Kochi-based Abad Group, run by Managing Director Riaz Ahmed, a fifth generation descendant of the founding family. The group’s origins were a dried-fish exporting business, started in Kerala in 1932, according to OnManorama. The group also owns Abad Builders which has developed 48 residential buildings, with more than 3,000 apartments.

Spurred by demand from tourists, Keralites have set up roughly 37,000 restaurants, ranging from small, roadside eateries to cafés and fine-dining spaces, including in hotels. There are also chains, including Paragon, Salkara and M Grill.

The price of a breakfast of idli, dosa, appam or puttu, with coffee or tea, at a road-side restaurant, range from Rupees 80 to 200, $0.80 to $2, per person. Lunches at mid-range restaurants cost Rupees 250 to 600, $2.50 to $6, per person. Breakfast at the KTDC resorts, such as Tea County, Munnar, and Samudra, Kovalam, cost around Rupees 500, $5, and lunch or dinner, Rupees 700 to 850, $7 to $8.50, per person.

Serving of beer, wine, and spirits is more restricted in Kerala than in other parts of India, including Goa, another popular tourist destination. Alcohol is served only by premium hotels and resorts and licensed restaurants.

As the appeal of Keralite food has risen, there are more than a hundred high-end hotels, resorts, and Ayurveda facilities which offer cooking classes to prepare appam, fish curry, halvas, and other dishes.

In the Ayurvedic field, several entrepreneurs, who initially set up treatment resorts, have expanded into manufacturing and selling branded Ayurvedic medicines, herbal cosmetics, massage oils, nutraceuticals, health foods and wellness beverages. There are now more than 500 such manufacturers in Kerala. They include the Arya Vaidya Sala, Kairali Ayurvedic Group, and Vaidyaratnam Oushadhasala. Arya, based in Kottakal, manufactures more than 530 formulations, including for pain management, boosting immunity, eye care, and baby care. The formulations are available in nine categories, including fermented, powdered herb, pill, and oil-based.

As the population ages, demand for Kerala’s nature-based healthcare services will grow, likely making tourism an even larger part of the state’s economy.

However, Kerala’s tourism industry faces major challenges. They include congested roads, impact of climate-change, and, most important, competition from Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Maldives.

Up until a decade ago, Kerala was far cheaper for foreign tourists. In 2026, the total costs for a ten-day trip, for a British or American couple, to Kerala, Vietnam and Sri Lanka are roughly the same.

Travel to Kerala is becoming more expensive due to higher costs, especially of unskilled labor and real estate. Daily wage rates in Kerala are among the highest in India. It is being driven up by a combination of powerful labor unions and a highly educated workforce, which avoids manual labor. Ironically, Kerala, which exports labor to the Persian Gulf countries, imports unskilled labor - around three million - from the poorer regions of Bihar, West Bengal, and other Indian states.

Then, demand for homes and other real estate in Kerala keeps rising, from relatively affluent Keralites working outside the state, especially those in the Persian Gulf countries. This has sharply boosted prices of land and construction costs.

There is then climate-related risks, though this also applies to competing tropical tourist destinations. In 2019, for instance, the summer and monsoon tourism business, across much of Kerala, was severely hurt by heavy rain, floods, and landslides. There was also a highly publicized outbreak of the Nipah virus and fears of flood-related communicable diseases, particularly leptospirosis (rat fever), dengue fever, influenza, and hepatitis A.

Given the challenges, entrepreneurs, officials, and policy makers in Kerala must recognize that the state’s advantages in tourism needs to be nurtured and strengthened, or it can evaporate quickly. There are no compelling reasons for foreign tourists to spend their money in Kerala. Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Maldives also offer beaches, forests, and birding, good food, and massages, yoga, and other nature-based wellness treatments.

The example of the cashew industry in Kerala offers a good lesson. In the mid-1990s, Vietnamese delegations visited Kollam to learn about Kerala’s cashew nut processing operations. By 2006, using automation and favourable government labor and other policies, Vietnam overtook India as the leading exporter of cashew nuts. Meanwhile, Kerala’s cashew agro-industry was unable to cut costs and improve quality, severely damaging the state’s centuries-old dominance in the global supply of the nuts.

Unlike Vietnam and Sri Lanka, Kerala offers a rare blend of ancient, proven Ayurveda-based medical services and numerous leisure attractions. Will Kerala’s advantage soon disappear due to complacency and neglect or since it is being copied by rivals? Or, will those in Kerala’s tourism business focus on improving quality and services and lowering costs, thereby continuing to attract more foreign tourists?

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Sunil Mani is a visiting professor, Centre for Development Studies, and Ahmedabad University, both in India. The views expressed are personal.

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This essay will be part of the book, Kerala and Keralites: The Promise and Challenges. The book is a collection of essays and interviews from the Global Indian Times, edited by Ignatius Chithelen and Cherian Samuel. Bryant Park Publishers. Publication date July 2026.

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By Ignatius Chithelen

June 25, 2026

Selling even premium teas and coffees is intensely competitive, largely a commodity business, with low barriers to entry for new sellers. Costco’s site, for instance, lists more than fifteen premium, organic breakfast teas, including from large brands like Bigelow, Twinings, and Pure Leaf, all stating their teas are made from natural ingredients and are environmentally friendly.

So, Sunny faces a major challenge of fine-tuning the quality, quantity, and price of the Chai Box teas to attract new buyers and convert them into long-term customers. A big advantage in selling caffeinated teas and coffees, as Starbucks, Nespresso and Blue Bottle have shown, is that, once buyers like a taste, and are satisfied with the service and price, they will continue to keep buying since the beverages are addictive.

Apparently, Sunny’s strategy is to first attract Indians and other South Asians in the US as customers. If Sunny can get even five-percent, of nearly two million South Asian households, to buy Chai Box teas, it could be a lucrative, niche company.

“Growing up in an Indian household, I started drinking Chai at the age of two and blending teas at the age of twelve,” Sunny says in a blog post. “For me, Chai is more than just a drink, it is a part of my culture and heritage...an integral part of my family’s daily ritual.”

Ignatius Chithelen is the publisher of Global Indian Times and author of Six Degrees of Education and Passage from India to America. A Chartered Financial Analyst, he is manager of Banyan Tree Capital, New York. Neither he nor Banyan has any financial or other interests in any of the companies mentioned in this story.

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This essay will be part of the book, Kerala and Keralites: The Promise and Challenges. The book is a collection of essays and interviews from the Global Indian Times, edited by Ignatius Chithelen and Cherian Samuel. Bryant Park Publishers. Publication date July 2026.

By Ignatius Chithelen.

June 26, 2026

Earlier this month, the first Chai Box Café opened in Atlanta, United States. “It’s finally Chai time!” posted founder Monica Sunny on Instagram, where she has over 55,000 followers. “The Chai Box began as a family recipe and a dream of sharing Chai with others…that dream becomes Atlanta’s first Chai Cafe!”

The café sells hot teas, including a masala tea, All Chai’d Up, for $5 and an Iced masala tea for $6. It also sells an Iced Matcha, made from ground green tea leaves, for $7, and coffees, in partnership with Driftaway Roasters.

Chai Box and other high-priced tea and coffee vendors benefit from a market developed by Starbucks. Over the past four decades, Starbucks has expanded to more than 40,000 stores globally, with nearly half of them in the United States. Consumers shifted to buying Starbucks coffee, abandoning local vendors and powders and beans sold by Folgers, Nestle’s Nescafe, and other giant brands. In 2025, Starbucks, which has a market value of $115 billion, had $37 billion in revenues.

Many consumers, having been introduced to a better coffee by Starbucks, seek fresher brews for their daily caffeine kick. Meanwhile, numerous physical and online stores sell tea, tea leaves, coffee and coffee beans, which they say are superior tasting, heathier, and environmentally friendly.

The vendors range from cafes run by Chai Box and local baristas to chains of stores. One of the chains is Blue Bottle Coffee, founded in 2002 by James Freeman, a freelance clarinet-player in Oakland, California. He had grown weary of the commercial coffee enterprise and stale, overly roasted beans. Blue Bottle operates more than 100 stores in the US and another 40 in Japan, South Korea and China. Then, there is Nestle’s Nespresso which operates 802 stores in 515 cities, in 81 countries.

Chai Box’s online store sells a range of items including several varieties of loose-leaf teas and blends of teas mixed with spices; also concentrates, gift sets, spices, spoons, tumblers, mugs, candles, tote-bags, and stickers. The spices are sourced “from small-scale farmers in Kerala who…have been cultivating their spices for generations,” according to a Chai Box post on LinkedIn. The family of Sundeep Sunny, Monica Sunny’s husband, is from Kerala.

All Chai’d Up, Chai Box’s version of the popular Indian masala chai, is a blend of loose-leaf Assam black tea with ginger, clove, cinnamon, cardamom, and fennel. A one-pound pack sells for $65, good for brewing about 90 cups of tea, based on the typical 15 oz size mugs in American kitchens. While the price is steep for a home-brewed tea, it is comparable to the prices paid by US consumers for a cup of coffee, buying Nespresso pods for their expresso machines.

“Ever since I was a little girl, Chai was an integral part of my family’s daily ritual,” notes founder Sunny on the Chai Box site. “I have taken my passion for Chai with my mother’s recipes, along with generations before, and created blends inspired by different regions in India.”

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Chai Box’s teas have gotten good media coverage, including on the Food Network and epicurious. In 2021, film and TV star Oprah Winfrey chose Chai Box’s The Ultimate Chai Lover’s Gift Set as one of Oprah’s Favorite Things. Now called The Chai Lover’s Set, and priced at $80, it includes four bottles of teas: 2.5 oz of All Chai’d Up; 2.5 oz of Sweet Monsoon, a blend of black tea with flavors of mangoes, coconut, cinnamon, and clove; 2.0 oz of Hill Station, a blend of black tea, cardamom and roses; and 1.7 oz of Lavender Nights, a caffeine-free blend of lavender, rose, and cardamom, made with rooibos leaves.

Winfrey’s team also arranged for the teas to be featured on the ABC television show Good Morning America. Following the TV show and Oprah’s recommendation, Chai Box’s monthly sales quadrupled to $377,000, according to CNBC.

In 2016, Sunny launched The Chai Box online store as a side-business after a mom, enjoying the tea she offered during a play-date for one of her sons, asked why she wasn’t selling the teas she blended.

In March 2020, following the start of the COVID-19 lockdown, Monica Sunny lost her job and her husband Sundeep Sunny was furloughed from his job, according to CNBC. She focused full-time on The Chai Box, including approaching retailers, attending food industry trade shows, and adding more posts on chai meditation on her store’s Instagram app.

Sunny,worked as a human resources consultant in Atlanta, for Chick-fil-A, a chain of fast-food chicken sandwich outlets, from 2003 to 2020. Earlier, she was at Accenture, 2000 to 2003, according to her LinkedIn profile.

She earned a MS in Human & Organization Development from Vanderbilt University, 2000, and a BS in Education from Georgia State University, 1997.

Monica Sunny, 51-years-old, has three sons whom she taught to make chai at an early age. She migrated to the US in 1984, from Punjab, India, when she was nine-years-old, along with her parents. “(M)y parents were working fast food jobs just to survive,” Sunny told Oprah Daily. “So, my brother and I were always home alone cooking and cleaning…it was my first time seeing tea bags…As an immigrant family, we may not have been able to afford much, but we could always afford chai.”

“(M)y dad has been my unofficial business consultant since the start of The Chai Box (and even before). I call him every single morning to seek his advice,” Monica Sunny told Shoutout Atlanta in 2023. Chai Box has under ten employees, according to its LinkedIn site; seven others on the site were former employees.

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Sundeep Sunny co-founded Chai Box with wife Monica, according to a Georgia Tech post. He manages the manufacturing, supply chain, and operations. He studied at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, also known as Georgia Tech, according to an Instagram post. Apparently, neither Chai Box nor Sundeep have published his professional and educational information.

Evidently, the Sunnys have ambitions to grow Chai Box into a major brand. As part of this effort, Chai Box’s teas are also sold at some Costco and Paper Source stores in the US. In 2024, Costco stores in Los Angeles and Southern California began carrying Chai Box’s bottle of Masala Chai Concentrate, Sweetened. The first Costco order boosted Chai Box’s revenues by a fifth, according to a Georgia Tech research note.

In 2025, Chai Box began selling its Masala Chai Concentrate in thirteen Costco stores in Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama. A news release making this announcement stated Chai Box was “a women-owned” company. On its website too, Chai Box states it is certified as a Women Owned Business, apparently to publicize it seeks contracts set aside for women and minorities by companies and government agencies.

Currently, on the Costco site, a Chai + Biscuits + Stainless Steel Steeper Gift Set, from Chai Box, sells for $39.99. The set includes a 16 oz bottle of Masala Chai Concentrate, lightly sweetened; 2.5 oz of All Chai’d Up, the masala chai blend; 2.5 oz of True Blend, a traditional loose-leaf chai; one pack of Bourbon Chocolate Biscuits; and one stainless steel steeper. As usual, Costco enables its members to make the purchase at a big discount. Buying the same items online on Chai Box, a Chai+Biscuits gift set and a steeper, costs $58, nearly 50 percent more.

The other Chai Box item sold online by Costco is the Founder’s Chai Loose Leaf Collection, for $59.99., This is a one third discount from the $80 price for a similar set of six teas, Founder’s Chai Collection, on the Chai Box site.

Perhaps, Chai Box sells large volumes of products via Costco, which makes up for the lower price it receives.

However, selling even premium teas and coffees is intensely competitive, largely a commodity business, with no barriers to entry for new sellers. Costco’s site, for instance, lists more than fifteen premium, organic breakfast teas, including from large brands like Bigelow, Twinings, and Pure Leaf, all stating their teas are made from natural ingredients and are environmentally friendly.

So, to grow Chai Box into a sizeable brand, Sunny faces the challenge of fine-tuning the quality, quantity, and price of the teas to attract more new buyers and convert them into long-term customers. A big advantage in selling caffeinated teas and coffees, as Starbucks, Nespresso and Blue Bottle have shown, is that, once buyers like a taste, and are satisfied with the service and price, they will keep buying since the beverages are addictive.

Apparently, Sunny’s strategy is to first attract Indians and other South Asians in the US as customers. But South Asians are extremely price-conscious. Online, alongside the Chai Box products, Costco lists competing products, like Stash Tea Essentials Variety Pack, a box of 180 tea bags, 30 each of six flavors including masala tea, for $23.99. Costco’s own Kirkland brand 100-count green tea bags, which sell for $13.99, has gotten 1,922 five star ratings from buyers. Yet, if Sunny can attract even five-percent, of nearly two million South Asian households in the US, to buy Chai Box teas, it could be a profitable, niche company.

“Growing up in an Indian household, I started drinking Chai at the age of two and blending teas at the age of twelve,” Sunny says in a blog post. “For me, Chai is more than just a drink, it is a part of my culture and heritage...an integral part of my family’s daily ritual.”

An earlier story on The Chai Box was published April 15, 2022.

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Ignatius Chithelen is the publisher of Global Indian Times and author of Six Degrees of Education and Passage from India to America. A Chartered Financial Analyst, he is manager of Banyan Tree Capital, New York. Neither he nor Banyan has any financial or other interests in any of the companies mentioned in this story.

This essay will be part of the book, Kerala and Keralites: The Promise and Challenges. The book is a collection of essays and interviews from the Global Indian Times, edited by Ignatius Chithelen and Cherian Samuel. Bryant Park Publishers. Publication date July 2026.

(Image: Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

By Ignatius Chithelen

June 21, 2026

“I just rushed here after my classes,” says Krishna R, as he introduces himself. We met last week in New York, at a conference on Trends in Credit Markets held by a financial data provider.

He was registered for the conference by the job placement office of a university in the New York area, where he just completed a MS in Finance. “I came here to network with employees of Fitch and Moody’s (which are financial rating agencies.) I want to find out what skills they seek in entry level employees,” he says.

Krishna, who graduates this week, has not found a job in the United States. How about the other students from India in your class, I ask. “Only four found jobs” in the US, he says. “There are ninety Indians in my class. We make up half of the 180 students” in the MS program. Why did only four Indians, and not the others, find jobs, I ask? “They have more experience. More than five years,” says Krishna.

The key MS Finance courses include Data Analytics, Corporate Finance, Capital Markets, and Risk Management, all of which require good numerical skills. Employers in the US, hiring for such roles at the entry level, prefer candidates with an undergraduate degree, or at least a minor, in either math, statistics, accounting, or econometrics.

Krishna, 26-years-old, earned a BA in Economics and Finance from a mid-ranked college in Chennai, India. Employers in the US may not hire him since he did not study math, I say. “No. It is because I have only two years of experience,” he says. He worked as a junior analyst in the credit department of a major private Indian finance company in Bangalore. “I have financial skills,” adds Krishna. “I passed the second level CFA exam” in 2024, before he came to study in the US.

The tuition, room, meals and other costs totaled about $130,000 for Krishna’s two-year Master’s. “I got a scholarship. It covered half my costs,” he says. “It was merit-based. I got 750 on the GMAT. Higher than the 730 minimum required for admission to Harvard’s MBA program,” he says.

More business schools in the US “are giving steep discounts on tuition that can save students up to 50%,” The Wall Street Journal reported last week. Also, the Journal reported, that “The unemployment rate for workers (in the US) under 35 with a master’s degree has rarely been higher in the past 20 years…”

Most Master’s programs in the US, including at the top business schools, offer “merit” scholarships to fill up the class. Apparently, by analyzing data of past students with similar financial backgrounds, universities offer an amount of scholarship which is most likely to attract a student to enroll, by borrowing the funds needed to cover the rest of the costs.

US universities face large, rising budget deficits, with even some major ones having to cut faculty and staff. Part of the reason is that, after years of sharp increases, foreign enrollments in MS programs are declining. This is because there are far fewer jobs for foreign graduates in the US and due to visa restrictions. To try to make up the shortfall in revenues, US universities offer teaser scholarships, pay consultants in India $10,000 for each student they help enroll, and use other aggressive strategies to recruit more students from India. The rational guiding faculty and officials at US universities is the version of India publicized by Indian government officials: there is a rapidly growing, wealthier middle class in India due to the country’s strong economic growth.

As is evident from Krishna’s class, students from India provide a sizeable portion of the revenues for many MS programs in the US. In the 2024-25 academic year, there were 363,000 students from India in the US, with 90 percent of them pursuing Master’s degrees. That year, they are estimated to have spent at least $24 billion to study in the US.

Scores on the Graduate Management Admission Test, GMAT, are not required by most MBA and MS programs in the US, including by the university Krishna attended. In fact, even the Harvard Business School has no minimum score requirement on the GMAT or even the less rigorous GRE test. Only 28 percent of the 943 students, in the Harvard MBA Class of 2027, submitted scores for the old, more rigorous GMAT 10^th Edition; the scores ranged from below 690 to above 770.

Krishna, along with 85 of his classmates, will have to leave the US within a month since it is highly unlikely an employer will hire them on a practical training visa. They return to India with a huge education debt burden to repay.

Krishna borrowed $65,000 from a private lender in India, with no collateral, at an annual interest rate of 10.5%. The lender “saw I have a good chance to repay the loan,” he says. “I got into a good university. I had high GMAT scores. I passed the first two CFA exams.” His parents were against him borrowing such a large sum. “My parents did not have to put up collateral for the loan,” says Krishna, as he wipes sweat from his forehead.

Major Indian banks, including the government-run State Bank of India, require collateral, usually the family home, for foreign education loans above Rupees five million, or $52,000. Also, apparently to reduce its losses on the loans, State Bank lends only to students admitted to one of the top 100 universities around the world. The university Krishna attended is not among the 36 US universities on the list. The terms of the State Bank loans are far more consumer friendly than on those made by private lenders, including interest rates which are two or more percent lower.

Like Krishna, most Indians who study in the US are not from wealthy families. So, they borrow $50,000 to $200,000 from Indian banks and lenders to pay for their education expenses, depending on whether they pursue one-or-two year-Master’s degree, at state or private US universities.

Krishna grew up in Chennai where his father works in a white-collar job at a government-run company. While working for a finance company in Bangalore, Krishna met colleagues who had worked in the US for three or more years and saved a decent amount, even after paying for loans for their American MBA or MS Finance degrees. So, he decided to seek a financial job in the US by pursuing a MS in Finance. “I wanted to study in New York. It is the financial center,” he says. Krishna had no interest in studying in the United Kingdom, even though the total costs are roughly a third to half lower than in the US.

Most universities in the US, especially those in the big cities, offer several Master’s degrees in finance, full-time and part-time and on campus and online. Programs include MBAs, Finance, Quantitative Finance, Data Analytics, and Risk Management. In addition to finance, in their drive to bring in more revenues, many of the big universities offer more than a 100 Master’s programs, most of which offer limited job prospects, including for American students.

Krishna applied to eight US universities, four top schools and the rest of lower quality in the New York area. How did he choose them, I ask. “I used the rankings published by the Financial Times. I also looked at job placement information” from the schools, he says.

Business schools in the New York City area emphasize that students will study in New York, the financial capital of the world, minutes from Wall Street; they can participate in a broad range of networking opportunities; and work as interns at financial firms. They also highlight that their MS degrees are Science, Technology, Engineering and Math programs. This allows Indian and other foreign students to be eligible for employment for up to three years on the Optional Practical Training visas, unlike one year for those with non-STEM degrees.

Krishna was rejected by Princeton, Columbia, New York University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Baruch College. He was accepted by the University of Southern California. “The cost was $200,000. They did not offer me any scholarship,” he says. He was also accepted by Pace University in New York. “Pace gave me a similar scholarship. But it is ranked lower than the university I attended.”

The university where Krishna earned his MS is ranked in the 50’s, only a few steps higher than Pace and slightly lower than the University of Southern California. The Financial Times ranks 70 MS Finance programs around the world.

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In 2024, before President Donald Trump’s changes in work visa policies, a student from India, with a STEM MS or PhD, had at best a one in three chance of being hired on a practical training visa. I ask Krishna how he knew if the rankings and job placement data would mean he will find a job in the US upon graduation. “I connected with recent graduates on LinkedIn,” he says. “They said if you get good grades and have experience you can find a job.” But do grades matter, I ask. He has good grades but not found a job.

I ask Krishna if he realized that Trump’s visa policies would lead to far fewer jobs in the US for students from India. When Trump was elected in 2024, “I was already in my first semester,” he says. I ask, did you not want to return to India and avoid at least $48,000 in debt. “I was getting top grades,” says Krishna. “I decided to continue.”

Given the massive unemployment among college graduates in India, Krishna evidently has good skills and work habits to be hired by a major financial firm in Bangalore. I ask if he should have stayed on the job and finished his CFA instead of borrowing $65,000 for an American MS degree. He leaves, saying he must network with employees of the rating agencies.

The US based CFA Institute confers the Chartered Financial Analysts designation to those passing all three exams. The fees for the exams, including for study materials and practice exams, total $3,520 for early registrants. Each exam lasts 4.5 hours, split into two sessions. In 2025, more than 150,000 candidates sat for the exams around the world. A quarter of them were from India, where the exams are held in 26 cities. The pass rate, for completing all three exams in the minimum 18 months, is around 10 percent. There are more than 200,000 CFAs around the world. Financial firms, including in the US, hire CFAs and many employees earn the charter while working, which enhances their career prospects.

Since the 2010s, most top students from India, including from the reputed Indian Institutes of Technology, avoid pursuing advanced degrees in the US since they have to borrow large sums to cover their costs.

Currently, most Indians pursuing MS degrees in the US are from mid-or-low tier colleges in India, who ignore the burden of debt, believing they will find better career opportunities in the US than in India. They are influenced by the stream of stories on the success of Indian professionals in the US, widely covered by the media in India.

Yes, many of the engineers and doctors, who migrated to the US in the 1970’s and 1980’s, achieved professional and financial success. But they were the top students in India, from the IITs and the best medical colleges. Most of them did not take on large debt to pursue advanced education in the US. More important, most found jobs in the US upon graduation.

Ironically, since the 2000s, the reduced work visa and job opportunities for Indians earning foreign degrees is in part due to a sharp increase in their numbers. In 2024, more than 1.3 million Indians were enrolled in foreign universities. This is up twenty-five fold, from about 53,000, in 2000; and up seven-fold, from about 192,000, in 2010. Hence, the intense competition, among college graduates for jobs in India, is also occurring among Indians with degrees in foreign countries.

The current reality, as Krishna and his classmates have found, is that the prospects of students from India finding a job in the US, especially after earning a MS from a mid-or-low ranked university, is one in twenty; US job prospects are far lower for Indians with non-STEM MS degrees.

I see Krishna at the cocktail reception after the conference ends. I wish him good luck in finding a job and paying off his debt.

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(The student is referred to as Krishna.R, not his real name, to protect his identify.)

Story updated May 17, 2026.

Ignatius Chithelen is the publisher of Global Indian Times and author of Six Degrees of Education and Passage from India to America. A CFA, he is manager of Banyan Tree Capital, New York.

(Image: courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

Ironically, the reduced work visa and job opportunities in the US and UK for Indians earning foreign degrees is in part due to a sharp increase in their numbers. In 2024, more than 1.3 million Indians were enrolled in foreign universities. This is up twenty-five fold, from about 53,000, in 2000; and up seven-fold, from about 192,000, in 2010. Hence, the intense competition, among college graduates for jobs in India, is also occurring among Indians with degrees in foreign countries.

Yet, many Indian students continue to believe that a foreign degree, even a non-STEM one, is the key that will enable them to get a high-paying foreign job. In part, they are influenced by stories about the success of Indians, especially in the US, widely covered by the media in India.

Ultimately, the responsibility lies on the parents and the students. They should view borrowing for a foreign degree with a realistic understanding of the risks.

A foreign education loan should not be a speculative gamble, like borrowing a large, high interest loan to buy a lottery ticket.

By Sunil Mani

Currently, several hundred thousand parents in India are nervously reviewing and signing documents for a loan to fund a daughter or son’s education at a foreign university.

Admission to a Master’s in science, technology, engineering, medicine or math, STEM, program in India is intensely competitive. Even, assuming the government could come up with the funds to double or triple the capacity of such programs, there is the much bigger problem of high unemployment, including among those with advanced STEM degrees. Many students view earning an advanced foreign degree, especially at a university in the United States and the United Kingdom, as a solution.

Most Indians who study abroad are not from wealthy families. So, they borrow $50,000 to $200,000 from banks and other lenders in India to pay the tuition fees, living expenses, and other costs, in the US, depending on whether they are pursuing one-or-two year-Master’s degree, at state or private universities. Indians studying in the UK borrow loans ranging from US $40,000 to US $90,000.

Parents and other family members, who often co-sign the loans, borrow from any willing lender: government-run and private banks, non-banking financial companies, and privately owned education-finance lenders such as Auxilo, Avanse and Credila. The lenders are attracted by the large size of loans, high interest rates, long repayment periods, and, f there is a default, their ability to seize homes and other real assets used as collateral for the loans.

Education-finance institutions such as Credila have lent an estimated Rs 60,000 crores, $6.1 billion, to students pursuing foreign and also Indian degrees. While there is no government or Reserve Bank of India data on foreign education loans, they are estimated to account for more than half of all education loans.

In theory, foreign education loans differ from most other forms of household borrowing since they finance investment in human capital, rather than immediate consumption. Up until the early 2000s, this was mostly true, especially for STEM graduates of globally reputed universities. They found jobs, especially in the US and UK, benefitting from relatively favourable immigration policies, demand for skilled workers, and far lower competition from fellow Indians. Most of them also did not have to take on large education debt.

However, since the mid-2000s, each year fewer and fewer Indian graduates have found jobs, including in the US and UK. This is due to work visa restrictions and more competition for jobs, especially from fellow Indians.

Recently, prospects for students from India finding a job in the US and UK have worsened; even more so for those with non-STEM degrees. In one case, of Indians graduating with a MS in Finance from a low-ranked university in the New York area, only one in twenty found a job in the US. The rest were forced to return to India with $65,000 or more in education debt.

Meanwhile, the foreign education loans Indians have to borrow keeps getting larger, due to rising tuition fees and living costs and the rapid depreciation of the Rupee. Even if they can find a high-paying job in India, upon their return, many of them will take more than twenty years to repay their foreign education debts.

Indeed, ironically, the reduced work visa and job opportunities for Indians earning foreign degrees is in part due to a sharp increase in their numbers. In 2024, more than 1.3 million Indians were enrolled in foreign universities. This is up twenty-five fold, from about 53,000, in 2000; and up seven-fold, from about 192,000, in 2010. Hence, the intense competition, among college graduates for jobs in India, is also occurring among Indians with degrees in foreign countries.

Yet, many Indian students continue to believe that a foreign degree, even a non-STEM one, is the key that will enable them to get a high-paying foreign job. In part, they are influenced by stories about the success of Indians, especially in the US, widely covered by the media in India.

The rising, large numbers indicate that most Indians pursuing foreign degrees are from mid-or-low tier colleges in India. Meanwhile, since the 2010s, several top students from India, including from the reputed Indian Institutes of Technology, are reluctant to incur large educational debts to study abroad.

Foreign universities, especially in the US and UK, face rising budget deficits. So, to try and bring in more revenues, they use aggressive strategies to recruit more students from India to grow their revenues. The tactics include teaser scholarships and paying consultants in India $10,000 for each student they help enrol.

In fact, students from India provide a sizeable portion of the revenues of advanced education institutions in the US and UK. In the 2024-2025 academic year, there were 363,000 Indians at colleges and universities in the US. That year, they spent at least an estimated $24 billion to study in the US. In the 2025-2026 academic year, there were around 98,000 students from India pursuing advanced degrees in the UK, who will spend at least $4 billion.

The government-run State Bank of India is the country’s largest lender of foreign education loans. It lends up to Rs 30 million, $320,000, with loans larger than Rs 0.75 million, $8,000, requiring homes or other real assets as collateral. Interest rates are floating, and vary according to benchmark lending rates, the institution attended, loan amount and borrower’s economic profile.

The terms of the State Bank loans are far more consumer friendly than on those made by private lenders, including interest rates which are two or more percent lower. The bank also offers preferential terms, on interest rate and collateral, for students admitted to the top-ranked global institutions. Other government-run banks broadly follow the same rules as the State Bank.

Credila is India’s largest specialized education lender. It offers loans exceeding Rs 5 million, $53,000. In its assessment, it places more emphasis on figuring out if a borrower and their family can repay the loan. So, Credila examines a student’s academic profile, ranking of the foreign university which they plan to attend, future income potential, and, perhaps most important, the financial resources of parents and other co-signers of a loan.

Education loans account for only about two per cent of total outstanding personal loans in India. While a small portion of overall consumer borrowing, they have risen sharply, up from less than a quarter percent in the early 2000s.

However, education loans have emerged as one with the highest level of loan defaults among all consumer loans. In 2024, nearly four percent of the total education loans outstanding were non-performing, with payments not being made for ninety days or more, according to the Reserve Bank of India. A stricter economic-loss ratio measure, including restrucutred loans, would show a far higher rate of loan defaults. Many loans are restructured since many graduates earn significantly less than estimated at the time the loans were disbursed.

Even as defaults rise on education loans, there is little evidence of lenders taking possession of homes and other collateral. Typically, lenders are reluctant to pursue foreclosure of homes and other assets since it impacts middle class families, who are politically vocal. Apparently, ruling politicians fear that aggressive recovery tactics by lenders will bring more attention to the major issue of high unemployment in India, including among STEM graduates, which drives students to pursue a foreign degree.

So, while financial institutions have the legal authority to seize a home used as collateral, they do so rarely. They pursue alternative measures such as restructuring, repayment rescheduling, settlements and recovery proceedings. This may explain why Credila pays less emphasis to securing collateral when making education loans.

However, at a macro level, even a substantial deterioration in the performance of educational loan portfolios is unlikely to de-stabilize India’s banks. This is because of the modest size of educational loans compared with housing and credit card loans, and more so, compared to the government-run banks massive lending to businesses and farmers.

Each year though, hundreds of thousands of middle-class families join the ranks of those facing financial stress due to taking on a foreign education loan. For many of them, the loans may exceed the mortgage debt they owe on their homes. Loan repayments reduce consumption, deplete retirement savings, and, in some cases, require additional borrowing.

In recent weeks, several hundred thousand students returned to India, since they could not find jobs in the US, UK, and other foreign countries. Indians are hearing grim stories from relatives, neighbors and friends about them being burdened with large foreign education debt. Such stories are also being covered by Indian news sites and on social media posts.

By now, the Reserve Bank of India should have data which can identify foreign programs and institutions which offer the best chance for an Indian student to secure a foreign job, or, if forced to return, enable them to find a high-paying job in India. The RBI should mandate that lenders only make loans to students enrolling in such programs.

Ultimately, the responsibility lies on the parents and the students. They should view borrowing for a foreign degree with a realistic understanding of the risks.

A foreign education loan should not be a speculative gamble, like borrowing a large, high interest loan to buy a lottery ticket.

Sunil Mani is a visiting professor, Centre for Development Studies, and Ahmedabad University, both in India. The views expressed are personal.

By Ignatius Chithelen

May 23, 2026

There were four players of Indian heritage, among the 156 competing for the Professional Golfers Association Championship held last week, at the Aronimink Golf Club, in suburban Philadelphia: Akshay Bhatia and Sahith Theegala, from the United States, Sudarshan Yellamaraju, Canada, and Aaron Rai, England.

Bhatia and Yellamaraju were cut after the first two rounds. Theegala finished tied for 60^th place and Rai won the championship. He is the first Englishman to win the title since 1919, the first British Asian to win a major, and only the second golfer of Indian heritage to win one of golf’s four major annual tournaments. Vijay Singh, from Fiji, won three majors: two PGA Championships, in 1998 and 2004, and the Masters in 2000.

“I would not be here without her,” Rai said about his wife Gaurika Bishnoi Rai, at the press conference after his win. She is “a real support system for my game.” Gaurika, 27-years-old, is a professional golfer from India on the Ladies European Tour,

In his twelve previous major tournament starts, Rai had never finished among the top ten players. His highest finish was being tied for 19^th at the 2025 PGA Championship and the 2024 US Open.

Last Saturday evening, after the third round of the 2026 PGA Championship, Rai was tied for 8^th place. Chatting in the car, he told Bishnoi that, while he had a good chance of winning, he was fearful of success, according to a New York Times report. He was scared that the fame, attention and demands on time, which comes with winning a major, would make him lose himself. Bishnoi told Rai that she would not let that happen, since “We’re going to lead our lives the same way.” She added, “stay true to yourself,” and he will achieve his potential. After chatting for about thirty minutes, they drove to their hotel.

Since qualifying for the PGA Tour in 2021, Rai had one prior win, at the 2024 Wyndham Championship. He had six wins on the international circuit, including the 2018 Hong Kong Open and the 2020 Scottish Open.

In ten starts on the PGA Tour this season, Rai finished four times in the top 25. The week prior to the PGA Championship he finished 5^th at the Myrtle Beach Classic.

Heading into Sunday’s final round, Rai was among 22 players within four shots of the lead, which was a PGA Championship record. The others included Scottie Scheffler, from the US, ranked number one in the world, and Rory McIlroy, from Northern Ireland, ranked number two.

Rai, who uses a driver from 2019, is not a long hitter – his average drive of 287 yards places him 151st on the PGA Tour. But he ranks fourth in driving accuracy. In putting, he ranks 154th.

During his final round at the PGA Championship, Rai’s accurate drives, combined with good putting, helped him win. He hit seven of the last eight fairways and made seven straight single putts. On the par-5 ninth hole, he made a 40-foot eagle putt. He then birdied the 11^th hole to take the lead, which he held till the end. On the 17^th hole, he sank a 70-foot birdie putt. “Was just trying to focus on speed and get it close” to the hole, Rai said at the post-event press conference. “Just kind of conspired all together for that ball to go in the hole…a real bonus.”

Shooting five under par on his final round, Rai finished at nine under par for the tournament, three strokes ahead of Spain’s Jon Rahm and American Alex Smalley. Scheffler finished tied for 14^th place and McIlroy tied for 7^th. Rai won $3.7 million in prize money, taking his total winnings on the professional golf tour to $12.3 million.

Rai, 31-years-old, is 5 feet 11 inches tall and weighs 168 pounds, 76 kilograms. He has lived in Jacksonville, Florida, since he started playing on the PGA Tour. Like Akshay Bhatia, he did not attend college. At age seventeen, Rai started competing on the lowest rung of the professional golf circuit in the United Kingdom.

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Rai’s father Amrik Singh, an amateur tennis player, quit his job as a community worker so he could take him to golf practice and tournaments. From the age of ten, Rai’s parents paid the fees for him to be coached by Piers Ward and Andrew Proudman. Golf professionals in Wolverhampton, England, they now run Me and My Golf, an online academy. They continue to advise Rai, who views them as part of his family.

Since Rai was four, his father took him to hit balls at the 3 Hammers Golf Complex and also to two pitch-and-putt courses, run by the local council. The public courses “played a vital role” in Rai’s golf journey, notes the New York Times.

Speaking of the fees, the equipment and other golf expenses incurred by his parents, Rai told Golf Monthly, “It wasn’t money that we really had, to be honest.” His father sought media coverage for his son’s early golf wins, hoping to attract sponsors.

At age eight, after Rai qualified for the world junior championships, Shabir Randeree started funding Rai’s golf expenses and also paid the fees for him to attend a private secondary school in Wolverhampton. A Muslim of Pakistani heritage, he was the owner of the first golf course Rai joined. He is chairman of DCD, a London-based investment firm. Randeree, who continues to be Rai’s sponsor, has “almost been like a second father to me,” Rai said at the post-chmpionship press conference.

Rai was born and raised in Wolverhampton, a working-class city about 17 miles north of Birmingham. About a quarter of the 300,000 population are Asians, mainly Sikhs, and Blacks. Both sets of Rai’s grandparents were from India. His father Amrik Singh, a Sikh, grew up in England while his mother Dalvir Shukla is an immigrant from Kenya of Indian heritage. Rai has three older siblings, two sisters and a brother.

Asked about his parents at the PGA Championship press conference, Rai said that he “will get way too emotional…I can’t put into words how much they’ve done in terms of the support, in terms of the care, in terms of love.”

Rai imbibed the values of hard work and dedication from his parents and siblings. His mother, who is a mental health nurse, worked long hours, including taking up two jobs for a while, to provide financial support for the family. One of Rai’s sisters started working when she was 14. His father instilled in Rai the importance of building good habits on and off the golf course.

Three or four times a week, Rai watched tapes of Tiger Woods playing in amateur and professional tournaments. He also watched soccer games on TV, is a supporter of Manchester United and a fan of Cristiano Ronaldo, who played for the team.

Up until he was about eight, Rai wanted to be a Formula One race car driver. His interest in golf was due to an accident. His mother bought him a set of plastic golf clubs, mistaking them for hockey clubs.

Rai’s parents, unlike most Indian parents, encouraged him to pursue golf. For other Indian parents, Rai told BBC in 2018, “It was more about getting an education and a proper job, and sport or tennis at that time was never really seen as a proper job.”

Growing up in England, he played golf with two gloves to keep his hands warm and maintain his grip in the often cold, rainy conditions. One day his dad forgot to put the two gloves in the bag, so he had to play with one. “I couldn’t play - I couldn’t feel the grip - so I’ve always stuck with the two gloves ever since.” Unlike other golfers on the professional tour, Rai wears two gloves instead of one, both black and weather-proof.

Rai is humble, polite, kind, and practices harder than most, making him popular with fellow professional golfers. “You won’t find one person on property who’s not happy” for Rai, McIlroy said after Rai’s win.

Unlike almost all sports stars, Rai is modest. He lives in a large, but not palatial, home in Florida. “He’s just not here to market himself as anybody that he’s not,” Rai’s wife Gaurika told The New York Times. Rai has no agent and no social media presence, apparently not seeking to make money from his fame. Gaurika has an Instagram account, with more than 7,100 followers, and an X/Twitter account with nearly 1,000 followers.

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(Photo: Gaurika Bishnoi and Aaron Rai at their wedding, 2025. Courtesy Bishnoi Instagram.)

Rai’s major win has boosted his popularity in the UK and the larger Indian market. So, he is likely being offered lucrative sponsorship deals by global sports and consumer brand companies.

Also, if he chooses, Rai does not have to work hard on improving his golf game. With the PGA Championship win, he can play in the tournament for life. For the next five years, he also automatically qualifies for the other majors, Masters, US Open and The British Open; as well as for the PGA Tour.

Will the fame and wealth distract Rai or will he win more tournaments, including majors? From an early age, Rai’s father bought him the best set of golf clubs. After practice and tournament rounds, his father cleaned every groove of the clubs with a pin and baby oil and put on protective covers, including on the irons.

So, unlike other professional golfers, Rai uses covers for his irons. At the press conference, after the PGA Championship, he said he leaves the plastic covers on “to remember where I came from and to respect what I have.”

In 2020, Rai earned $1.4 million in prize money for winning the Scottish Open. He treated himself to a Mitsubishi Evo car, which then cost roughly $70,000, even though he could easily afford a more expensive, luxurious Rolls Royce or Mercedes Benz. Laughing, he explained his choice to a reporter of The Times, London: The Evos, made on a budget, had no flashy interiors, “they were just pure and focused. Those are the values I believe in.”

Gaurika, a Hindu, and Rai married in 2025. In 2018, Gaurika chatted with Rai’s mother during his round at the Hero Indian Open, part of the DP World Tour. It was held at her home club, the DLF Golf Club, near Delhi. Rai’s mother asked her to wait and meet her son, she told Golfweek.

After Rai’s PGA Championship win, a follower commented on an Instagram post by Gaurika, “the more he listens to you the better he plays.”

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Ignatius Chithelen is the publisher of Global Indian Times and author of Six Degrees of Education and Passage from India to America. A Chartered Financial Analyst, he is manager of Banyan Tree Capital, New York.

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(Photo: Gaurika Bishnoi and Aaron Rai at their wedding, 2025. Courtesy Bishnoi Instagram.)

March 23, 20264

By Ignatius Chithelen

Rai’s PGA Championship win has boosted his popularity in the UK and the larger Indian market. So, he is likely being offered lucrative sponsorship deals by global sports and consumer brand companies.

Also, if he chooses, Rai does not have to work hard on improving his golf game. With the PGA Championship win, he can play in the tournament for life. For the next five years, he also automatically qualifies for the other majors, Masters, US Open and The British Open; as well as for the PGA Tour.

Will the fame and wealth distract Rai or will he win more tournaments, including majors?

In 2020, Rai earned $1.4 million in prize money for winning the Scottish Open. He treated himself to a Mitsubishi Evo car, which then cost roughly $70,000, even though he could easily afford a more expensive, luxurious Rolls Royce or Mercedes Benz. Laughing, he explained his choice to a reporter of The Times, London: The Evos, made on a budget, had no flashy interiors, “they were just pure and focused. Those are the values I believe in.”

Gaurika, a Hindu, and Rai married in 2025. In 2018, Gaurika chatted with Rai’s mother during his round at the Hero Indian Open, part of the DP World Tour. It was held at her home club, the DLF Golf Club, near Delhi. Rai’s mother asked her to wait and meet her son, she told Golfweek.

After Rai’s PGA Championship win, a follower commented on an Instagram post by Gaurika, “the more he listens to you the better he plays.”

Ignatius Chithelen is the publisher of Global Indian Times and author of Six Degrees of Education and Passage from India to America. A Chartered Financial Analyst, he is manager of Banyan Tree Capital, New York.

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(Photo: Mathai Mammen, CEO, Parabilis)

June 13, 2026

Parabilis is developing medicines, based on its helicon peptide platforms, to treat both rare and common cancers. Helicons are a type of peptides capable of modulating proteins in a cell, a task which conventional medicines could not accomplish. Peptides are short chains of molecules called amino acids, which make up a protein.

“(W)e have advanced a new class of medicines, Helicons, designed to reach targets long considered undruggable and move closer to our goal of creating extraordinary medicines for patients with serious diseases.” Mathai Mammen, Chairman and Chief Executive of the company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, posted on LinkedIn.

Mammen earned his MD from Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his PhD in Chemistry from Harvard University. He received his BSc in Chemistry and Biochemistry from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

His mother Molly Mammen was a technician scientist in a cancer lab at Dalhousie University. “I witnessed both overt and subtle discrimination, bias and powerful perseverance and courage, and success in everything that my mother took on professionally and personally,” Mathai Mammen states in a LinkedIn post. His parents migrated to Canada, from Kerala, India, when he was a toddler.

By Ignatius Chithelen. He is the publisher of Global Indian Times and author of Six Degrees of Education and Passage from India to America. A Chartered Financial Analyst, he is manager of Banyan Tree Capital, New York. Neither he nor Banyan has any financial or other interests in any of the companies mentioned in this story.

June 13, 2026

Parabilis Medicines, a US clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange this week. “(W)e have advanced a new class of medicines, Helicons, designed to reach targets long considered undruggable and move closer to our goal of creating extraordinary medicines for patients with serious diseases.” Mathai Mammen, Chairman and Chief Executive of the company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, posted on LinkedIn.

In March 2026, Parabilis’s zolucatetide was approved as an orphan drug to treat desmoid tumors, by the US Food and Drug Administration. An orphan drug status is granted to drugs that treat rare diseases affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US. Mammen said in a statement that the drug, “could help redefine the standard of care for patients with desmoid tumors and other tumors driven by the same elusive biology.”

Parabilis is developing medicines, based on its helicon peptide platforms, to treat both rare and common cancers. Helicons are a type of peptides capable of modulating proteins in a cell, a task which conventional medicines could not accomplish. Peptides are short chains of molecules called amino acids, which make up a protein.

Many peptides are naturally found in humans, acting as important messengers, telling cells when to produce hormones, repair damaged tissues, reduce inflammation, and more, according to a post on a Columbia University medical site. One well-known peptide is insulin, which is produced by the pancreas to regulate blood sugar.

Previously, from 2017 to 2023, Mammen was the global head of research and development at Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies, the drug division of Johnson & Johnson. Based in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Johnson & Johnson has a market value of $574 billion. It develops drugs to treat a variety of medical issues: cardiovascular and metabolism, immunology, infectious diseases and vaccines, neuroscience, oncology, and pulmonary hypertension.

Mammen oversaw an annual research and development budget of $4.5 billion. He led his team to global approvals for nine medicines. He also led Johnson & Johnson’s effort to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. In 2020, the company got $1 billion in funding from the US Department of Health to rapidly pursue the development, manufacture and distribution of its potential vaccine. But, after the vaccine was in use, in rate cases it triggered blood clots and other harmful side-effects. In 2023, the vaccine’s emergency use authorization expired and it was no longer available in the US, according to the US Centers For Disease Control.

Earlier, 2016-2017, Mammen was a Senior Vice President at Merck, overseeing therapeutic areas including immunology, oncology, immuno-oncology, cardiovascular, metabolic, and renal diseases.

In 1997, Mammen co-founded and ran the research and development team at Theravance, a San Francisco Bay Area company, which was based on his earlier research at Harvard University. Over the next 17 years, his team of 200 scientists created five approved products as well as a pipeline containing many additional drug candidates. In 2014, Theravance separated into two publicly traded companies: lnnoviva, which has a royalty income and invests in medical companies, with a market value of $1.7 billion, and, Theravance Biopharma, focused in the area of pulmonary disease, with a market value of $845 million.

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(Photo: Mathai Mammen, CEO, Parabilis)

Mammen serves on the board of Sandoz and other corporations and is an advisor to investment firms General Atlantic and Foresite Capital. He has more than 150 peer-reviewed publications and patents. He earned his MD from Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his PhD in Chemistry from Harvard University. He received his BSc in Chemistry and Biochemistry from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

His mother Molly Mammen was a technician scientist in a cancer lab at Dalhousie University. “I witnessed both overt and subtle discrimination, bias and powerful perseverance and courage, and success in everything that my mother took on professionally and personally,” Mathai Mammen states in a LinkedIn post. His parents migrated to Canada, from Kerala, India, when he was a toddler.

One of Mammen’s heroes is his aunt Aleyamma Chetty, his mother’s older sister. Chetty graduated from the Christian Medical College, Vellore, India. After training at the Children’s Hospital, Boston, she returned to practice and teach at CMC Vellore, including as head of the pathology department.

In a 2020 LinkedIn post, Mammen writes about the loss of his daughters Mia and Madelaine (Laine), both at age six - Mia from a still-unknown chronic illness in 2010 and Laine from appendicitis in 2014. He has a son Mathew.

In his post, Mammen says, “it’s crucial to acknowledge the blessings we’ve received with heartfelt gratitude. In honoring this philosophy, and as a life-long tribute to Mia and Laine, I’ve devoted my life to creating truly meaningful medicines by working with and enabling brilliant teams.”

In 2023, Mammen took over as the CEO of Parabilis from the company’s co-founder Gregory Verdine. The research which led to the development of helicons - and founding of Parabilis - was conducted, since the late 1990s, by Verdine and members of his laboratory in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. A serial entrepreneur, Verdine, 66, is a professor emeritus at Harvard and a venture partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a Menlo Park, California venture capital firm with more than $90 billion in assets.

One of the companies partnering with Parabilis is Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, which invested $125 million in Parabilis. The plan is to combine “the intracellular access and binding capabilities of our Helicons against challenging targets with antibodies from Regeneron,” Mammen said in a statement. If certain commercial and other targets are met, Parabilis could receive up to $2.2 billion in royalty and other payments from Regeneron - which has a market value of $64 billion.

In 2025, Mathai earned $1.3 million in salary and other income at Parabilis. He owns stock in the company worth roughly $85 million.

In a post on LinkedIn, Mammen states that Parabilis “was founded on the belief that some of the most important targets in human disease were not beyond the reach of medicine – they simply required a different approach.”

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By Ignatius Chithelen. He is the publisher of Global Indian Times and author of Six Degrees of Education and Passage from India to America. A Chartered Financial Analyst, he is manager of Banyan Tree Capital, New York. Neither he nor Banyan has any financial or other interests in any of the companies mentioned in this story.

(Photo: Harrow International School, Dubai. Courtesy Taaleem Holdings)

By Ignatius Chithelen

June 6, 2026

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For decades now, the top students from reputed non-profit and government-run schools have been admitted by the best colleges in the West. Many alumni enroll their children at the top schools they attended, expecting they will then be admitted by a top college. So, they track the number of students from their schools admitted by the top colleges. Since they donate to their college, or know major donors, they lobby college officials to admit the same or larger number of students from their schools.

Given such long-established, recruiting of students from the top non-profit and government-run schools, by the top colleges, for-profit schools find it very tough to place their graduates at these colleges. So, typically, college-educated, upper income parents in the West and in India, do not enroll their children in for-profit schools, even those with reputed brand names and modern facilities.

Meanwhile, in the Gulf countries, for-profit schools are forecast to see rising demand. Running for-profit schools in those kingdoms is a lucrative business with high profit margins. In fiscal year 2025, for instance, Taaleem had a 15% profit margin; profits were $44 million on revenues of $307 million, which were both roughly double that in fiscal year 2022. Taaleem, which is listed on the Dubai Stock Exchange, has a market value of around $810 million, according to Reuters. It has 4,100 employees.

Taaleem pays a licensing fee for its Harrow schools to a subsidiary of the charity which owns Harrow School, UK. The fee is used for a number of charitable aims, including widening access to the Harrow School, UK. There are more than a dozen licensed Harrow schools operating around the World, including ten in China and one in Bangalore, India.

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Ignatius Chithelen is the publisher of Global Indian Times and author of Six Degrees of Education and Passage from India to America. A Chartered Financial Analyst, he is manager of Banyan Tree Capital, New York. Neither he nor Banyan has any financial or other interests in any of the companies mentioned in this story.

(Photo: Harrow International School, Dubai. Courtesy Taaleem Holdings)

By Ignatius Chithelen*

June 6, 2026

In August, the Harrow International School for boys and girls, set up by Taaleem Holdings, will begin operating in Dubai. The school will combine “Harrow’s 450-year tradition of academic excellence with Taaleem’s proven dedication to delivering the highest standards of education” across the United Arab Emirates, the school’s site states. The private, for-profit school is based on the British curriculum. Located on a twelve-acre campus, facilities include digital design and 3-D printing spaces, orchestras, cricket nets and a rugby and soccer field.

The original Harrow, set up in 1572 under a British Royal Charter, is a non-profit, residential, upper school for boys. Located on a 224-acre campus near London, it has roughly 830 students. Alumni include British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, King Hussein of Jordan, scientists, inventors, writers, admirals, and businessmen.

The academic leaders of Harrow Dubai Harrow are British, who bring “a deep understanding of the British independent school system,” according to the school’s site. The total annual fees at Harrow Dubai range from AED 86,650, US $23,400, for nursery, to AED 119,440, $32,200, for the upper school. The fees at the Harrow School in Britain totals nearly $90,000.

The Dubai school is the first of the Harrow schools which Taaleem plans to launch in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait, which together make up the Gulf Cooperation Council. The schools will be independently owned and operated by Dubai-based Taaleem. Harrow’s teams oversee that the “educational purpose, practice, strategy and philosophy, tailored to the needs of their students and locations,” meet Harrow’s standards.

In 2025, Dubai-based for-profit GEMS Education opened its School of Research and Innova­tion in the city. Based on the British curriculum, its programs include training in digital skills, ballet, fencing, and martial arts. The fees, which range from $25,000 to $35,000, are similar to those of Harrow Dubai.

The UAE comprises of seven kingdoms. More than three quarters of its eleven million population live in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, which each have roughly four million people. Abu Dhabi’s revenues come from exporting roughly three million barrels of crude oil per day. Dubai has two major ports, a major cargo airport and is a tourism hub.

Nearly ninety percent of UAE’s population are expatriate blue and white-collar workers, with about half from India and the rest from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Philippines. British and Americans occupy many of the senior roles in business and government-run entities.

Roughly two thirds of the students in the Gulf countries are enrolled in free, government-run, primarily Arabic language schools. The region has very few quality, non-profit international schools. So, for-profit schools are the only option for expat and Arab parents, who have the income and want their children to study at an international school.

In Abu Dhabi and Dubai there are roughly 260 international schools operated by GEMS, Taaleem, Aldar Education, Nord Anglia, and other companies. They offer the International Baccalaureate, British, American, French, Indian and Egyptian curriculum.

Parents pay high fees at some of the for-profit schools, like Harrow Dubai and GEMS Innovation, expecting their children will be admitted by a top international college. Hence, it is not surprising, that, while Harrow Dubai says it will teach students the Harrow values of “Courage, Honour, Humility and Fellowship,” its major goal is to prepare students “for entry into leading universities worldwide.”

Top colleges admitting students from existing Taaleem schools include Cambridge and Oxford in the UK, and the University of California, Berkeley, and Johns Hopkins in the US. “GEMS students today are graduates of leading universities around the world,” states Sunny Varkey, in a founder’s message on the company’s site. Varkey, 69-years-old, is founder of the Dubai-based Varkey Group, which reportedly also owns healthcare, hotels and other business.

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(Photo: GEMS International School, Dubai. Courtesy GEMS.)

Taaleem, which means education in Arabic, owns and operates 13 premium schools in the UAE - ten of them in Dubai - with nearly 19,000 students. It also operates 23 schools on behalf of UAE government entities, with 24,000 Emirati students. Taaleem’s Chairman is Khalid Al Tayer, an Emirati. He is the managing director of a division of the Tayer Group, which owns nearly 200 retail stores in the Middle East, including joint ventures with Gucci, Prada, Armani, and other luxury brands.

Aldar manages 31 schools, mostly in Abu Dhabi, with 33,000 students. It owns some of the schools. Founded in 2007, it is part of Aldar Properties, a major developer and manager of retail, residential and commercial real estate. Listed on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange, Aldar Properties has a market value of roughly $16 billion, according to Reuters.

Sahar Cooper, the Chief Executive of Aldar Education, previously served as the Chief Schools Operations Officer at GEMS Education. Ravi Ramani, Aldar’s head of finance and information technology, was earlier “a key member of the leadership team” at GEMS for sixteen years.

GEMS operates 49 schools, with full or partial ownership, in the UAE, Qatar and Egypt. It also manages schools in other countries, including four in India, with one in Kochi, Kerala. GEMS serves more than 200,000 students and employs over 18,000 teachers and staff. The Chief Executive is Dino Varkey and Deputy CEO is Jay Varkey, sons of Sunny Varkey.

The GEMS schools in the UAE and Qatar have varying facilities and charge a wide range of fees. For instance, at the GEMS Dubai American Academy, which offers both the American and International Baccalaureate curriculum, fees range from $17,900 to $25,200. At the GEMS Our Own Indian School, Dubai, based on the Indian curriculum, fees range from $1,950 to $4,000.

Some expat and Arab parents in the Gulf, who have the financial resources, send their children to Harrow and other residential non-profit schools, run by philanthropic foundations and Christian churches, in the UK, Western Europe, US, and India. In these countries, there are also several free, high quality, government-run schools, especially in upper income localities.

For the past several decades, the top students from such reputed non-profit and government-run schools have been admitted by the best colleges in the West. Many alumni enroll their children at the top schools they attended, expecting they will then be admitted by a top college. So, they track the number of students from their schools admitted by the top colleges. Since they donate to their college, or know major donors, they lobby college officials to admit the same or larger number of students from their schools.

Given such long-established, recruiting of students from the top non-profit and government-run schools, by the top colleges, for-profit schools find it very tough to place their graduates at these colleges. So, typically, college-educated, upper income parents in the West and in India, do not enroll their children in for-profit schools, even those with brand names and modern facilities.

In 2025, GEMS “closed” its GEMS World Academy in Chicago, reportedly due to being unable to attract enough students. Started in 2013, its facilities included a planetarium, media center, a 25-meter swimming pool, and a 500-seat auditorium.

In 2023, GEMS World Academy, Switzerland, “was declared bankrupt”, according to executives-edge.com. The school shut down four years earlier. GEMS exited the Singapore, Malaysia and Kenya markets after a few years. “I should have done more acquisitions rather than doing greenfield ventures,” Varkey told Forbes in 2025.

Varkey is chairman of GEMS Schools Management which, for a fee, provides “seasoned leaders and data-led systems” to boost the “commercial success” of owners of new and existing schools.

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(Photo: Sunny Varkey, founder GEMS Education. Courtesy GEMS.)

Meanwhile, in the Gulf countries, for-profit schools are forecast to see rising demand. By 2029, the region may require an additional 2,800 schools, since student population is estimated to rise by one million to 15.5 million, according to Alpen Capital. The assumption is that the region’s economy continues to grow, bringing in more expat workers and their families. In three years, the Gulf’s overall population is expected to rise by about six million to 67 million.

In 2024, GEMS Education was bought by a group led by Brookfield Asset Management. This underscores Brookfield’s “commitment to investing” in the high-growth Middle East region, a news release from the company stated. It added that Brookfield “purchased GEMS Education…with its founder representing $2.0 billion in equity.” It is not known if this means the share of ownership of the Varkey Group, which founded GEMS, was worth $2 billion in the new GEMS. Based in New York, Brookfield manages more than $1 trillion in assets across infrastructure, energy, private equity, real estate and credit.

GEMS origins are traced to Mariamma and K.S. Varkey, parents of Sunny Varkey, who were expats in Dubai from Kerala, India. In 1959, they began coaching Arabs in English for a fee. In 1968, the couple set up Our Own English High School, Dubai, catering to the immigrant Indian community. The school is still in operation.

Sunny Varkey was born in Pathanamthitta district, Kerala, India. After finishing high school in India and the U.K., he did not attend college. He worked at Standard Chartered Bank in Dubai. In 1978, not wanting to retire as a bank manager with little wealth, he quit and started the Chicago Maintenance Company to perform various maintenance services. He used the title Chicago, he told Gulf News, because the western name “would make it easier to attract European expats” as clients.

In the early 1980’s, Varkey began managing his parents’ school after they promised not to interfere with how he ran it. He grew the business into the GEMS (Global Education Management Systems) network of schools.

In 2010, Knowledge@Wharton asked Sunny Varkey about the controversy over whether education should be for-profit or non-profit. Varkey said, “GEMS Education believes in education for profit because it enables us to reinvest in education and help establish more schools for more children.”

Forbes estimates Sunny Varkey’s net worth to be $4 billion. Varkey is one of the few Indian billionaires, around the globe, to sign the Giving Pledge, which requires making a public commitment to donate to philanthropies. The pledge was established in 2010 by Warren Buffett, who ran Berkshire Hathaway, and Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft. The London-based Varkey Foundation annually awards $1 million to a teacher.

Running for-profit schools in the Gulf countries is a lucrative business with high profit margins. In fiscal year 2025, for instance, Taaleem had a 15% profit margin; profits were $44 million on revenues of $307 million, which were both roughly double that in fiscal year 2022. Taaleem, which is listed on the Dubai Stock Exchange, has a market value of around $810 million, according to Reuters. It has 4,100 employees.

Taaleem pays a licensing fee for its Harrow schools to a subsidiary of the charity which owns Harrow School, UK. The fee is used for a number of charitable aims, including widening access to the Harrow School, UK. There are more than a dozen licensed Harrow schools operating around the World, including ten in China and one in Bangalore, India.

In about eighteen months, Taaleem plans to add 5,000 seats, boosting the 24,000 capacity of its premium schools by a fifth, including by opening its second Harrow School in Abu Dhabi. The media in the Gulf countries and education consultants label the Taaleem Harrow schools as being “super-premium.”

Apparently, Taaleem expects its Harrow brand of schools will enhance the reputation of its other premium schools, thereby attracting more students. The average annual fees at Taaleem’s non-Harrow premium schools are $16,500. So, rival schools, operating in the same markets and charging roughly similar fees, will likely face stronger competition from Taaleem.

Taaleem’s Harrow Abu Dhabi was to “open its doors to students in mid-2026,” as the first of the Harrow schools in the Gulf countries, according to a 2025 statement by the Abu Dhabi Investment Office, Taaleem’s partner on the project. It will be a residential and day school for boys and girls, based on the British curriculum. While Harrow Dubai starts operating in August 2026, Harrow Abu Dhabi does not have a website yet.

In 2025, construction of Harrow Abu Dhabi began on Saadiyat Island, according to a statement by Koda, the architectural and design firm. One of Aldar’s flagship schools, Cranleigh Abu Dhabi, operates on the same island. Based on the British curriculum, it was launched in 2014, following a “commercial agreement” with the Cranleigh School, UK. The annual fees at Cranleigh Abu Dhabi range from $19,000 to $28,500, similar to those of Harrow Dubai.

This raises a speculative question: Are there issues between Abu Dhabi’s Aldar and Dubai’s Taaleem groups, over their respective British-branded schools on Saadiyat Island, which may be delaying the launch of Harrow Abu Dhabi?

Like Harrow’s agreement with Taaleem, Cranleigh offers training and monitors the quality of the Aldar school and earns a licensing fee. A non-profit, Cranleigh also has licensing agreements with three schools in China. Founded in 1865, in Surrey, near London, the original Cranleigh is a day and residential school for boys and girls. Prominent alumni include actors, writers, rugby players and those in business. The fees for day students is $62,000 and, for residential students, $76,000.

Since February, after the start of the US-Israel war with Iran, Taaleem’s stock has fallen by a third, reflecting questions about the war’s major, long-term damage on UAE’s economy. Assuming there is little economic damage, will the rising capacity of premium schools lead to more competition between Taaleem, GEMS, Aldar, and other for-profit schools? Or, as Gulf countries rapidly expand automation and use of artificial intelligence tools, will it boost demand for highly skilled expats as well as for international schools to educate their children?

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*Ignatius Chithelen is the publisher of Global Indian Times and author of Six Degrees of Education and Passage from India to America. A Chartered Financial Analyst, he is manager of Banyan Tree Capital, New York. Neither he nor Banyan has any financial or other interests in any of the companies mentioned in this story.

(Photo: Burjeel Medical City, Abu Dhabi. Courtesy Burjeetl.)

By Ignatius Chithelen

May 30, 2026

Burjeel, an Abu Dhabi based for-profit company, operates 115 healthcare facilities, across the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Saudi Arabia, part of the Gulf region. They include 20 hospitals, 39 medical centers, 30 physiotherapy and wellness centers, 15 pharmacies, and 11 other allied services, including Tajmeel cosmetology and dental centers. Burjeel’s facilities, which have 1,700 beds, employ more than 11,000, including nearly 1,800 doctors.

Burjeel is pursuing organic revenue growth, without incurring major capital expenses, by admitting more patients It seeks to do this by raising the utilization of its bed capacity, from the current 67 percent to 80 to 85 percent. Also, over the next three years, Burjeel plans to set up two new hospitals in Dubai, four out-patient surgery centers, six medical centers, and two fertility clinics in the UAE.

Earlier this month, Vayalil posted on Facebook, where he has 244,000 followers, “The encouragement and support of the UAE leadership always inspire us to think bigger, build for the future, and turn ambition into reality.”

Ignatius Chithelen is the publisher of Global Indian Times and author of Six Degrees of Education and Passage from India to America. A Chartered Financial Analyst, he is manager of Banyan Tree Capital, New York. Neither he nor Banyan has any financial or other interests in any of the companies mentioned in this story.