Global atlas

Southern Asia · data through 2024

India

India has the largest population living abroad of any country, spread across the Gulf, North America, Europe, and South East Asia, and it also hosts millions of people from its neighbours.

Twenty five year view

Movement in both directions

These lines show migrant stock, meaning people living outside their birth country at each point in time. They do not show annual arrivals.

Why people move

Leading documented drivers

  • • Wage gaps between Indian states and Gulf labour markets
  • • Recruitment systems that organise contract work abroad
  • • University places and skilled visa routes in English speaking countries
  • • Family reunification that follows earlier generations

Movement out of India runs along two very different tracks: contract labour to the Gulf, largely from Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar, and skilled and student migration to North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Money sent home is the largest remittance flow in the world.

Connections

Where movement connects

Common destinations

United Arab Emirates, United States, Saudi Arabia, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia

Common origins

Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar

Adapting and finding support

What helps

Kerala's returning workers face the reverse problem of coming home with savings and no ladder back into local work. Skilled migrants abroad often deal with long green card queues that hold families in place for a decade.

Start with the government pre departure and welfare systems before any private agent, and verify every recruiter licence.

Use the support guide

Research that explains this pattern

What the scholarship says

Behavioural economics

Remittances as household insurance

A household sends one member abroad to diversify its income, so a harvest failure or a currency collapse at home no longer threatens everyone at once.

Money sent home rises after disasters and downturns, and migration decisions are made by families rather than by individuals.

Oded Stark and David Bloom, the new economics of labour migration, 1985

Anthropology

Why corridors keep themselves alive

Each person who arrives lowers the cost and risk for the next, through housing, jobs, information, and trust. The route becomes self sustaining.

Corridors persist long after the original cause has faded, and policy alone rarely closes them.

Douglas Massey and colleagues, cumulative causation and network theory

Anthropology

Households living in two places

Many families are not here or there but genuinely both, with money, decisions, care, and authority moving constantly across the border.

Integration and continued attachment to home rise together rather than trading off.

Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc Szanton

Read the full scholarship library

Support inside and beyond India

Organisations people actually use

eMigrate, Ministry of External Affairs

Registers recruiters, checks contracts, and provides pre departure information for workers going abroad.

Indian workers taking overseas jobs

Open

Indian Community Welfare Fund and Indian missions

Emergency help abroad including shelter, legal aid, and repatriation through Indian embassies.

Indian nationals in distress overseas

Open

IOM country offices

Assistance, voluntary return, reintegration, and counter trafficking support through the local office.

Anyone moving, arriving, or returning

Open

These are public organisations. The project is not affiliated with them and cannot guarantee outcomes. Nothing here is legal advice or an emergency service.

Ask for support in India

This is guidance and connection to organisations. It is not legal advice and it is not an emergency service.

Sources and reading

India data in the UN DESA International Migrant StockIndia data in the IOM World Migration ReportIndia data in the Migration Policy Institute data hubUNHCR Global Trends

Figures are rounded published estimates. Causes and adaptation differ within every country and should not be read as a verdict about any person.