Friday, 17 May, 2024
By: Yash Gupte
Around 16,63,440 Indians have renounced their citizenship since 2011. Image Source: IANS
Highly skilled professionals, particularly those in the healthcare, IT, legal, accounting, and financial industries, find it simpler to get employment and settle in nations like the US, UK, Canada, Europe, Australia, and more.
The trend of leaving the home country and settling down in a foreign nation has become more common among Indians in recent years. According to the year-wise data on number of Indians renouncing their citizenship provided by the External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar in a response to a question in Rajya Sabha, a total of 2,25,620 Indians renounced their citizenship in 2022, highest in past 12 years. This is the first time the number has surpassed two lakh, and it is also the highest number of persons to renounce their Indian citizenship in a year. Around 16,63,440 Indians have renounced their citizenship since 2011. Out of this, only 85,256 persons gave up their Indian citizenship in the pandemic year 2020. Mr. Jaishankar also provided a list of 135 nations where Indians had obtained citizenship.
V Muraleedharan, minister of state for external affairs, responded to a different question by saying that the government is aware of the problem of professionals having been laid off by US companies in recent months. He said, "Of these, a certain percentage is likely to be Indian nationals on H-1B and L1 visas. The government of India has consistently raised issues relating to the movement of high skilled workers, including IT professionals, with the US government." The government, according to V Muraleedharan, has undergone a "transformational change" in how it interacts with the Indian diaspora globally. “A successful, prosperous, and influential diaspora is an asset for India. India stands to gain a lot from tapping its diaspora networks and productive utilisation of the soft power that comes from having such a flourishing diaspora,” he said.
Some of the obvious reasons behind high number of Indian individuals renouncing their citizenship can be better economic opportunities, tax benefits, better standard of living, better education and etc. Highly skilled professionals, particularly those in the healthcare, IT, legal, accounting, and financial industries, find it simpler to get employment and settle in nations like the US, UK, Canada, Europe, Australia, and more. Migration has become a global phenomenon. As they study abroad in countries like Canada, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand, a lot of Indian students also apply for citizenship there. And these are the reasons that most of the Indians have become citizens of USA (78,284), Australia (23,533), Canada (21,597) and United Kingdom (14,637) in 2021.
High-skilled people and students aren't the only ones giving up their Indian citizenship; the nation also ranks at the top globally in terms of the wealthy "purchasing" nationalities elsewhere. Around 23,000 Indian millionaires had left India since 2014 and an estimated 7,000 millionaires left India in 2019 alone.
In 2011, 122,819 Indians renounced their citizenship, followed by 120,923 in 2012, 131,405 in 2013, 129,328 in 2014, 131,489 in 2015, 141,603 in 2016, 133,049 in 2017, 134,561 in 2018, 144,017 in 2019, 85,256 in 2020, 163,370 in 2021, and 225,620 in 2022, according to data from the external affairs ministry. The written answer also included a list of 135 countries whose citizenship was acquired by Indians. However, the list didn’t give a specific numbers for each country or specify during which the foreign nations provided citizenship to Indians.
In conjunction with several recent reports of Indians doing well in the West — Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, IMF’s Geeta Gopinath, NASA scientist Swati Mohan, and others, the great Indian outflow sets off another brain drain debate amongst the intellectuals. Most of those who renounce their citizenship live in countries like the United States, Canada, UK and Australia. The fact is, since the 1960s, a lot of Indians who went for higher studies to these countries became citizens of these countries after years of effort. The number of students going abroad has now exploded and it is inevitable that a lot of them will renounce Indian citizenship in the years to come for better economic prospects.
