This morning Baskar had shared the data from the External Affairs Ministry on the countries to which Indians migrate out of India when they give up the Indian Citizenship. We have been in the current season of Raattai podcast discussing the issues that contribute or deter vibrant Democracy.
In trying to understand the facts related to why Indian's relinquish their citizenship, the following interesting facts came up --
- between 2011 and 2022, about 16.6 lakh Indians gave up their citizenship
- the trend shows a consistent growth, except brief lows and the big drop during the pandemic year.
- subsequent to pandemic the people giving up Indian citizenship has dramatically increased.
- while GoI data shows that Indian gave up citizenship in India to become citizens of about 114 other countries (between 2018 and 2022), bulk of these people, i.e., 85%, went to 4 countries, viz., USA, Canada, Australia and UK.
- While USA remains the top destination amongst countries with about 40% of people going into USA as its citizens (Indians today are reported to be the largest nativized non-American born citizens of USA), among the continents bulk of the citizens went to Asia followed by Europe.
- After Asia and Europe, Africa is the third widespread continent to which Indians seem to migrate (to 29 African countries), whereas countries to which people migrate in North and South America is limited to 7 and 9 respectively.
in Europe, apart from UK, popular destinations for Indians to seek citizenship seems to be Italy, Germany, Netherlands and Sweden
on an impulse I checked the HDI and SDG index of the countries to which Indians gave up their citizenship and migrated, this was very striking.
About 99% of those who gave up Indian citizenship gave it up to go to countries with better HDI.
Similarly about 99% of the people who gave up their Indian citizenship went to countries with better SDG score.
Interestingly, Indians also sought citizenship in 28 countries with worser HDI and 46 countries with worser SDG, this may be worth exploring to understand why they do so.
Among the immediate neighbours (where one may assume there will be family and other ties because of which people seek citizenship), Nepal had the highest Indian citizens converting to Nepali citizenship (128) followed by Sri Lanka (106), Pakistan (69) and Bangladesh (16).
Data Source: Ministry of External Affairs
Thanks to: Baskar Manimegalai
Add new comment