ABSTRACT
A career in Indian nursing has, since the 1990s, been reshaped into a lucrative route to work overseas. A multi-faceted industry has sprung up around emigration, with agencies, supported by an eager state, promising ‘nurses anytime’ to the hospitals of the West.1 The phenomenon has drawn unprecedented public attention to nursing and has largely been celebrated in India. This chapter draws on interviews with nursing school and college principals and other nursing leaders (conducted in New Delhi and Thiruvananthapuram in 2005 and 2006), as well as on the growing literature on the global trade in nurses, to direct attention to domestic ramifi cations of large-scale migration. It suggests that frequent claims that emigration has revolutionised the status of nursing must be carefully qualifi ed. While it is fair to argue that emigration has radically improved individual nurses’ social status, the status of the profession in general and of nurses in the workplace continues to be low, and may even be reduced by the strains emigration is placing on the national health system.
