India’s most consequential contribution to the world isn’t a product, a service, or even a technology platform. It is people. Indian workers, entrepreneurs, scientists, physicians, investors, and public leaders now shape economies far beyond India’s borders. They staff hospitals in rich countries, build companies in frontier sectors, sit atop global firms and universities, and increasingly influence how India itself is understood abroad.
The new report on the Indian diaspora released last week by the global organisation Indiaspora estimates the Indian diaspora at 35 million people across more than 200 countries, with formal annual earnings of roughly $730 billion and remittances to India of $138 billion — the highest in the world.
Remittances are the largest, most visible and most economically meaningful dividend of this human export. Across the country, they support households, finance education and housing, and provide macroeconomic ballast. The report notes that remittances now finance nearly half of India’s merchandise trade deficit, and that a rising share flows from advanced economies rather than only the Gulf. The Indian presence abroad is no longer concentrated in low-wage labour migration alone, but is embedded in higher-wage, higher-skill segments of the global economy.
India’s pharmaceutical industry — the world’s largest supplier of generic drugs, built over decades with substantial State support — generated around $16 billion in export revenues in FY2024. India’s technology sector, the pride of the post-liberalisation economy and the country’s single largest source of foreign exchange, exported roughly $200 billion in software and services in the same year. Annual remittances sit between these two — larger than pharma by a factor of nearly nine, and more than two-thirds of the entire IT sector’s exports. Yet they flow without an export promotion council, or production-linked incentive scheme, or trade policy apparatus. They are generated entirely by people rather than firms, and almost entirely outside the attention of the government.
But remittances are only the opening chapter. The larger gains come later and will be worth far more. Once a diaspora reaches a certain scale and maturity, it generates second-order benefits: Trade links, venture capital, research collaboration, technology transfer, and institutional credibility. The Indiaspora report shows this transition already under way. Indian-origin professionals are prominent in global medicine, research, finance, and technology. The diaspora is overrepresented in early-stage investment into Indian startups, in cross-border research partnerships, and in the leadership of firms with large footprints in India. The strategic question is whether India will treat this as incidental advantage or build deliberate policy around it.
Other countries have done so more deliberately. Ireland used its diaspora to attract foreign investment and political support during decades of economic transformation. Taiwan and South Korea drew on expatriate scientists and engineers to transfer technology and build research institutions that proved foundational to their industrial rise. The specifics may differ, but the principle has been the same: A diaspora treated as a distributed national asset, rather than a population of emigrants periodically dispatching money to support their families, can meaningfully accelerate development.
India is now positioned for a similar shift. It has already harvested the remittance phase. The next task is to convert emotional attachment into long-lasting institutional engagement — and that requires giving overseas Indians a larger stake in the country’s future.
At present, India asks much of its diaspora symbolically but offers relatively limited civic and legal inclusion in return. Overseas Citizenship of India is useful, but it does not fully resolve the frictions around residency, long-term investment, research participation, or institutional commitment. Reducing regulatory friction, easing research collaboration, and clarifying tax and inheritance rules for non-resident Indians would help considerably. Beyond these practical steps, India would do well to revisit the broader question of dual citizenship — not as a concession, but as a considered instrument of national interest, designed with appropriate safeguards. Many countries have navigated this carefully. India can too.
India’s rise to Viksit Bharat will not be secured by remittances alone. Those are valuable, but they are the most basic return on exported talent. The larger boost will come from building the conditions under which Indians abroad can more easily invest, learn from, mentor, collaborate, and help build institutions at home. The world already benefits richly from India’s people. We need to think more sensibly about how India can benefit more fully from them too.
Ramanan Laxminarayan is president, One Health Trust. The views expressed are personal
