India, Feb. 22 -- For decades, India's most talented engineers served like coolies for American corporations. Many were sent on H-1B visas to handle the work few others wanted: maintaining aging systems, cleaning up bloated codebases, migrating databases at odd hours, and keeping global enterprises running in the background. The arrangement generated prosperity and foreign exchange, and it built formidable Indian IT giants. Yet it also meant that too much of India's technical talent was confined to sustaining other nations' systems instead of building its own. Engineers were treated as low-cost labour rather than as co-creators of intellectual property - and then disparaged for supposedly taking American jobs. The trade-off was accepted b...