A few excerpts from the report titled,
“Bringing The Diaspora Home: India's Expatriate Evacuation Operations” here.
1. According to the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), an estimated 11 million Indian citizens now permanently reside abroad, and almost 16 million people of Indian origin hold other citizenships.
2. Personal remittances are now twenty-nine times what they were in 1990.
3. Many more Indians are traveling abroad—in 2015, the government registered more than 20 million departures, or five times as many as in 2000.
4. Despite their concentration in Western countries, international migrants are also now prevalent in the high-growth economies of the Gulf region, representing demographic majorities in Qatar (91 percent), the United Arab Emirates (88 percent), Kuwait (72 percent), Jordan (56 percent), and Bahrain (54 percent).
5. 72 percent of global migrants are of working age, reflecting the economic motives of their displacement.
6. The case of remittances illustrates migrants’ rising economic significance worldwide: in 2015, a record $582 billion in remittances was transferred—of which approximately 75 percent went to developing countries.
7. Such remittances also exceed the foreign exchange reserves of at least fourteen developing countries and are equivalent to at least half of the reserves in more than twenty-six developing countries.
8. As of 2015, India is second worldwide in terms of net migration, with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as top destinations.
9. The Indian diaspora is also more geographically dispersed, with Indian citizens now living in almost 200 countries worldwide.
10. The rise in remittances has been dramatic, amounting to $68.9 billion in 2015—the largest transfer to any country worldwide.
11. These remittances far exceeded India’s earnings from high technology exports ($17.3 billion in 2014) and constituted 3.3 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) in 2015.
12. Compared to just 0.4 percent in the case of China. In some regional states like Kerala, around 30 percent of GDP now comprises remittances.
