E-Paper
Policy pathways to enhance the global mobility of Indian emigrants
This paper is authored by Manish Vaidya, ORF.
India’s recent economic growth has been closely intertwined with the movement of workers, students, and professionals, most of them to countries of the Global North and West Asia. This paper makes a case for strategic domestic interventions, at least in the short- to medium-term, to ease the barriers to the global mobility of Indian citizens. These can include effective migration management and the creation of a comprehensive emigration and overseas mobility policy. Beyond immediate improvements, these measures will also signal the government’s commitment to credible migration governance and address information asymmetries in the emigration process.
Between 2011 and 2024, some two million Indian nationals emigrated and gave up their citizenship. Every year too, many of the new entrants to India’s workforce look abroad for better-paying jobs. This emigration demand contributes to brain drain, reducing the quantity and quality of India’s human capital. According to the ministry of external affairs (MEA), as of 2025, 15.85 million Indians lived abroad and worked across various skill levels.
To be sure, emigration has benefits: strengthening India’s global diaspora and soft power, boosting remittance inflows, fostering skill acquisition and entrepreneurship, and easing the pressures on the domestic labour market. However, it also has drawbacks, such as the continued loss of skilled talent that undermines India’s developmental potential, an increased dependence on remittances, higher risks of labour exploitation, social strains such as family separation, and a potential decline in foreign wages for natives and the Indian diaspora due to a surplus of immigrant labour. Sustained emigration also risks weakening India’s comparative advantage in key labour-export sectors such as information technology (ICT) and software services, engineering and other technical professions, and business process management, as saturation spreads beyond specialised roles into other segments like platform work, startup migration, generic service-sector roles (retails, customer support, sales), and low-end professional services.
This paper can be accessed here.
This paper is authored by Manish Vaidya, ORF.
