By region
Australia, New Zealand, and the Indian communities of South and Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
The 'girmit' was the agreement — a five-year labour contract that carried more than 1.3 million Indians across the British Empire between 1834 and 1917. How the indenture system worked, from the recruiter's lie to the cane field, and the diaspora it built.
Can you get treatment in India on an OCI? Yes — OCIs and NRIs need no medical visa; they travel on their OCI or passport. The 2026 guide to going home for care: why the diaspora does it, the costs (65–90% less than the West), the hospitals, the e-Medical visa for everyone else, insurance, and the catches.
On 30 September 2026, a first officer stabbed Captain Smit Machchhar and tried to crash Flydubai flight FZ1073 to Tel Aviv. Bleeding, the Mumbai-born pilot got the cockpit door open — and 174 people lived. How an Indian captain became a hero to two prime ministers at once, and what it says about the diaspora in the Gulf.
Scholars from India, Mauritius and the Netherlands convene online, 10–12 September 2026, for an international symposium on India's indentured migration — under a banner they call 'Girmitiyalogy: Text, Theory and Literature.' What the field is, and how to attend.
From 1 April 2026, Form 15CA became Form 145 and Form 15CB became Form 146 under the Income-tax Act, 2025. For NRIs and OCIs sending money out of India, the process is unchanged — only the form numbers are new. What to file now.
Indians opened the Australian outback on the backs of camels — and then a nation founded on keeping them out spent seventy years trying to shut the door. From the 'Ghans' and the dictation test to a country where India is now the fastest-growing source of migrants.
Mariners' Cricket Club Singapore will host the '83 Legends Tour from 7–9 August 2026, reuniting Kapil Dev, Sunil Gavaskar and Mohinder Amarnath in what the club calls the first reunion of India's 1983 World Cup-winning squad in South-East Asia.
A Delhi High Court ruling voided the tender for India's outsourced consular services in Australia, but let them keep running — and passport and visa services resumed on 23 July across six upgraded centres, from Sydney to Perth.
Tamil films have a second life abroad — in the packed cinemas of Malaysia and Singapore, and, improbably, in Japan, where Rajinikanth's Muthu ran for 23 weeks and held a box-office record for 24 years.
For the first time, the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and Singapore together send more money to India than the Gulf — 51.2% of remittances against the Gulf's shrinking share. Behind India's record inflows is a diaspora quietly changing shape: from Gulf labourers to Western professionals.
Brought from Tamil Nadu to pick Ceylon's tea two centuries ago, Sri Lanka's Hill Country Tamils built the island's greatest export — then spent more than fifty years stateless, citizens of no country at all. How one of the diaspora's most wronged communities finally won a home.
In 1931, nearly half of Rangoon was Indian. Then came riots, a wartime death march, and a dictator's expulsions. The story of Burma's Indians — once the diaspora's richest outpost, now among its most forgotten.
Thirty thousand people filled Marvel Stadium for 'Melbourne Meets Modi'. The rally was not a sideshow to the India-Australia summit that produced it - the uranium deal, the trade pact, the defence pledge. It was the same instrument, seen from the other side. A decade on from Madison Square Garden, the Indian diaspora has become both the audience and the argument of India's foreign policy - and in Australia, for the first time, the numbers to back it.
PM Narendra Modi credited the Indian diaspora for the India-Australia relationship before a 30,000-strong Marvel Stadium crowd on 9 July, after a summit with Anthony Albanese produced 18 outcomes across defence, energy and trade.
The word 'girmit' itself comes from Fiji's cane fields. The Indians the British shipped there built the colony's economy — and have spent a century since being pushed to its margins.
Part 1 of Mother Tongues. When labourers from a dozen Indian districts were thrown together on Fijian plantations, their languages fused into something new — a tongue that is now the mother language of a people.
Part 1 of Children of the Girmit. Nearly 700,000 indentured Indians passed through a single stone depot in Port Louis — and their descendants became the majority, and the rulers, of an Indian Ocean nation.
The IOM's World Migration Report 2026 confirms India received about $138 billion in remittances in 2024 — the most of any country, and nearly double second-placed Mexico — underscoring the diaspora's economic weight.
The 2026 Grammy season made it impossible to ignore. Across Best New Artist, Best Pop Duo, Best Global Music Album, Best Global Music Performance, and Best Contemporary Instrumental Album — five different categories — Indian-origin singers and musicians weren't just present. They were the conversation.
A growing number of diaspora families are quietly moving back. The plane is the easy part. The actual return runs through tax-residency arithmetic, customs paperwork at Nhava Sheva, banking accounts that have to be redesignated on a clock, and a hundred small adjustments nobody warns you about. This is the practical map.
External Affairs Minister Jaishankar signed an archival cooperation agreement with Trinidad and Tobago to help members of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora trace their ancestral roots. The Government of India is creating a comprehensive global Girmitiya database.
The Government of India has extended Overseas Citizen of India eligibility to the sixth generation of Indian-origin diaspora in Trinidad and Tobago — recognising the descendants of indentured Girmitiya labourers who arrived in 1845. A historic outreach with implications for other long-tail diaspora communities.
Indian study permits to Canada have collapsed from 188,715 in 2024 to 94,605 in 2025 — a 50 per cent drop in a single year. The approval rate for Indian applicants fell from 81 per cent to 28 per cent. Brampton's agent economy is folding; families in Punjab and Andhra are reassessing; the Canadian dream that Indian families spent two decades constructing is being quietly dismantled. This is what the data shows, and what it does not.
An OCI pays Indian tax on Indian-source income — rent, interest, capital gains — under residency rules that tightened again on 1 April 2026. The TDS regime, DTAA relief, TCS on outbound money, and the traps, explained.
Four pathways into India's best universities for diaspora children — JEE Advanced for IIT, the DASA scheme for NITs, NEET for medicine, and direct application for the private liberal arts schools. Plus the ICCR scholarship overlay, the 4 March 2021 OCI cut-off that splits the rules, and the practical pitfalls.
For the first time in Australia's history, a non-British-origin migrant community is the country's largest. The shift coincides with a rise in anti-immigration demonstrations, including the 'March for Australia'.
Diaspora remittances to India climbed 14% year-on-year to US$135.46 billion, with the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia driving the growth.
New Zealand's revised 2026 student visa framework adds a 25-hour-per-week work limit, post-study work pathways, and new skilled-migrant entries — positioning the country as a quieter alternative to the harder-to-access US/UK routes.
The number of Indian students in Ireland has climbed from 700 to over 9,000 over the past decade. The 2026 GOI-IES scholarship cycle opened on 29 January.
From April 2026, every passenger flying to India — including NRIs and OCI cardholders — must complete a Digital e-Arrival Card before boarding. The physical disembarkation card has been discontinued.
Mumbai | 15 May 2026 For Indians living abroad, the search for an authentic taste of home rarely ends. The right kaju, the right kishmish, the right kulfi-style ice cream — these things matter in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t packed a suitcase full of dry fruits before a flight […]
The identity question is no longer a crisis — it’s a superpower For decades, young Indians growing up abroad were caught in an exhausting loop: too Indian at school, not Indian enough at home. The cultural tug-of-war that defined their parents’ immigrant experience was supposed to ease with time. For Gen Z, it has done
If you or someone you know has been quietly Googling hair transplants abroad — and wondering whether it makes sense to combine a trip home with treatment — this story is for you. Picture this: a man boards a flight from Manchester to Mumbai, not for a wedding or a family visit, but for a hair […]
The Edison wedding The Patel wedding I went to in Edison last summer had 1,400 guests, two days of pre-events, a sangeet rehearsed by a choreographer who flies in from Mumbai, and a baraat that got the local police to block off Oak Tree Road for forty minutes. It also had the most Gujarati I […]
