The internal migration of Indian scientists, 1981–2003, from an analysis of surnames

Although many Indian surnames are common across the whole country, some are specifically associated with just one or a few of the 35 states and union territories that comprise India today. For example, Reddy comes from Andhra Pradesh and Das, Ghosh and Roy from West Bengal. We investigated the extent to which researchers with names associated with some of the larger states were writing scientific papers in those states, and in other ones, and to see how these concentrations (relative to the whole of India) had changed since the early 1980s. We found that West Bengalis, for example, were now significantly less concentrated in their home state than formerly, and that their concentrations elsewhere were strongly influenced by the state’s geographical distance from West Bengal and, to a lesser extent, by the correlation between the scientific profile of their host state and their own preferences (which favoured physics and engineering over biology and mathematics). Thus they were strongly represented in nearby Bihar, Assam and Orissa, and much less so in Tamil Nadu and Kerala.