Well, essentially, the French did do something similar - more than that, they were actually importing Indian workers from the same place the British were. The French experiment with Indian indentured labour to their colonies in the Caribbean starts from the 1850s onwards, but French India lacked the manpower and resources to accommodate the needs of the planter class; they were instead forced to turn to British India as a source of workers, but only joined in that enterprise relatively late in its history of earnest practice. The French Caribbean imported only a fraction of the number of workers the British Caribbean did - a bit less than one-fifth of the British total.

In the French colonies themselves, morality rates were extraordinarily high; the annual death rate was as high as 77 per 1,000 people in the 1860s in Guadeloupe for Indian workers. For reference, mortality on Jamaican sugar plantations has been estimated to be about 35 per 1,000 people for African Jamaican slaves by the 1830s (see Higman, 1976). That represents significant attrition of the Indian population each year, being sustained only by continued migration this was a scheme that was extremely costly in terms of Human life but never involved the importation of Indian workers on the same scale. And though only a few workers opted to or could return to India at the end of their service, some certainly did, which obviously compounds the problem of population decline.

In Suriname, where migration from India also developed only very late in the indenture period, better conditions probably account for the stronger Indian population - public health was significantly better in that colony by the time Indian indenture got underway, and it has been suggested this explains the sustained increase in population for Indian workers.

Victor Bulmer-Thomas discusses gives a good, straight-forward overview of this in his recent book The Economic History of the Caribbean Since the Napoleonic Wars (2012), which is a very good (if a little too ambitious) oversight of comparative Caribbean economy, with reference to some relevant scholarship on indenture in specific colonial and national contexts.