Sanjayovacha | Emigration Policy Evolving From Welfare To Facilitation | Sanjaya Baru

The decision of the Narendra Modi government to introduce the Overseas Mobility (Facilitation and Welfare) Bill 2025 in Parliament, replacing the existing Emigration Act 1983, marks a turning point in India’s evolving policy on the export of human talent and labour. What began half a century ago as a voluntary emigration of skilled, semi-skilled and even unskilled Indians to countries where employment opportunities were available is now becoming organised emigration facilitated by the government itself.

The government, in short, has taken upon itself the responsibility to help export Indians.

The idea that the Government of India needs a ministry that could connect with overseas Indians first found expression in the report of the L.M. Singhvi Committee on the Indian diaspora, commissioned by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in 2001. It was left to the Manmohan Singh government to create such a ministry and define its purpose. In May 2004 the Union ministry of non-resident Indian affairs was created, and very soon after that it was renamed, in September 2004, as the ministry of overseas Indian affairs (MOIA).

For a decade, the ministry stood on its own feet and focused on two tasks: connecting with overseas Indians and securing the welfare of Indian workers overseas. In 2016 MOIA was merged into the ministry of external affairs. Therein lay a policy change of substance. It was one thing for the ministry of external affairs to use its global reach to reconnect with people of Indian origin and overseas Indians worldwide. It was quite a different thing for the MEA to then become the agency for the welfare of emigrant labour.

The original proposal of the Singhvi Committee has taken two very interesting turns and the proposed bill is, in effect, a third turn. Let me explain. As I have discussed in my recent book, Secession of the Successful: The Flight Out of New India (Penguin, 2025), the Vajpayee government decision to create an institutional mechanism to deal with the so-called Indian “diaspora” was motivated by a very different objective from the objective that defined the 1983 Emigration Act.

The latter was meant to protect the interests of the Indian working class employed, at the time, mainly in the Arab Gulf nations. The Singhvi report, however, sought to create a policy framework within which the BJP could connect with Indians, read Hindus, worldwide. After the creation of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the setting up of overseas units of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the VHP, RSS and BJP created a global Hindutva network that the Narendra Modi government began reaching out to in a more organised manner.

The official Indian policy of reaching out to overseas Indians had, therefore, two very different intentions. On the one hand, it was aimed at protecting the interests of overseas Indian workers and, on the other hand, it was aimed at imparting to India’s diaspora policy an ideological focus. As external affairs minister, Sushma Swaraj paid equal attention to both objectives and it is a matter of interest that the Modi government took great pride in the fact that an Arab country, home to lakhs of Indian workers, had become home to a Hindu temple.

When one examines closely the activities of the MEA and the diaspora division within the MEA over the past decade, it is clear that its policy walked on two legs — a policy for overseas Indian labour and a policy for overseas Hindus. The proposed Overseas Mobility (Facilitation and Welfare) Bill 2025 offers a third leg for the diaspora policy to stand on, namely, the “facilitation of emigration”.

The proposed bill states that it “envisages comprehensive emigration management, institutes a regulatory mechanism by developing a regime for safe and orderly migration governing overseas employment of Indian nationals and establishes a framework which creates policies and schemes for incentivising policy actions for the protection and promotion of welfare of emigrants”.

The decision to introduce this bill should be viewed in the context of recent initiatives of the Union government to actively facilitate the export of Indian labour.

Indian workers have been recruited by government agencies in several Indian states, including Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan, for employment in Israel, where local economic activity has been disrupted by the Israeli government’s decision to get rid of Palestinian labour. In yet another, if different, kind of initiative, the Government of India signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of Taiwan to export as many as 10,000 skilled Indian workers to be employed in the labour-seeking Taiwanese industrial sector.

These high-profile agreements seem to have triggered a wave of ambition to explore new employment opportunities worldwide for Indians faced with unemployment at home. The ministry of external affairs has been at the forefront in exploring these opportunities. The external affairs minister, S. Jaishankar, was candid when he launched a private sector initiative aimed at exporting Indian talent.

Pointing to global demographic trends, to large-scale Indian emigration that had already taken place, the minister said: “There is a demand in the world, and availability in India, and the basic groundwork done to enable Indian talent to gain global access is there. Now, how well they do that and what will be the scale — I think that is up to us.”

With this objective in mind, it seems, the minister has come forward with this bill that not only focuses on the “welfare” of Indians working overseas, which was the focus of the 1983 Emigration Act, but also on “facilitating” such migration. Since policymakers in India are unable to help secure employment for Indians seeking it at home, they will now step in to help such unemployed citizens locate opportunities overseas.

India is not the only country that has a government actively seeking employment for its citizens overseas. There are others like the Philippines and Mexico.

In most other countries that are home to emigrant labour, an important factor contributing to emigration is distress at home. Indian officials and diplomats will fight shy of confessing to such distress, even when media reports draw attention to it, but that is often the bottom line defining the supply of manpower. It is not just global opportunity but domestic distress that is driving Indian emigration policy.

Sanjaya Baru is a writer and an economist. His most recent book is Secession of the Successful: The Flight Out of New India