Editorial: An exodus of everyone

India is no stranger to outmigration by the unfortunate. We are the world’s largest source of emigrants. Over 18.5 million India-born people were living abroad as of 2024 — a threefold increase since 1990. In the first five months of this year, despite the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration into the US, more than 10,000 illegal migrants from India were apprehended on the border by Customs and Border Protection.

The desperation of the poor and the less equal to escape is well understood. As is the case with the flight of Indian students to foreign educational institutions, a post-COVID phenomenon that peaks in July every year. Over 1.3 million Indian students enrol in overseas institutions, with more than 1.3 lakh going to the US alone.

However, the well-to-do are opting out of India as well. According to the Henley Private Wealth Migration Report 2025, which analyses global migration trends of high-net-worth individuals, 3,500 Indian millionaires are expected to leave the country this year. That number would be down from 5,100 in 2023 and 4,300 in 2024, but significant, nevertheless. India ranks third behind the UK (16,500) and China (7,800) on millionaire outflow.

In his book Secession of the Successful, economist Sanjaya Baru says 23,000 millionaires left India in the last 10 years, averaging over 2,000 per year. It’s a dramatic shift from earlier historical phases where outmigration was dominated by labourers or professionals, not the rich.

So, this has become an exodus of everyone — tinker, tailor, teacher, tycoon. It’s a full circle of discontent that’s also a conundrum; it’s a system from which the common man feels excluded and in which the rich man feels trapped.

This pattern is reflected in the sharp rise in Indians renouncing citizenship — over 1.6 million since 2011, with the annual figure surging to more than 225,000 in 2022, the highest in a decade. The odd thing is that while India claims to be on track to become the world’s third-largest economy, its most successful as well as the most desperate citizens are making for the exits.

The exodus of the well-to-do is driven by a litany of grievances that the rich have the luxury of being able to do something about: red tape, arbitrary policies and taxes, misdirected priorities, aspiration to a higher standard of living, and access to better education, golden visas and investor residency programs abroad. However, alongside, there has also been a change in the way this government looks at migration itself: It now seeks to promote the export of skilled and wealthy Indians.

That’s the GATI policy, or the Global Mobility Partnership Action Plan. Launched in 2024 by the Ministry of External Affairs, it explicitly targets increasing overseas migration from the current 700,000 to 2–2.5 million workers, low-skilled as well as high, in the medium term, diversifying from overdependence on the Gulf to Europe, East Asia and Anglosphere countries.

This, in effect, is a surrender to the lure of remittances, which it aims to boost to $300 billion annually, and a dereliction of the government’s mandate of creating jobs. Living in a remittance-driven economy—where a significant portion of national income comes from money sent home by citizens working abroad — comes with multiple structural, social, and economic disadvantages. For a demonstration of the ills of a remittance economy, one has only to look next door to Nepal.