More than 2.16 lakh Indians gave up their citizenship in 2023, the Central government told Parliament on Friday.
The data was shared by Minister of State for External Affairs Kirti Vardhan Singh as a written response to a question by Aam Aadmi Party MP Raghav Chadha.
Chadha had asked the government for details of Indian citizens who renounced their citizenship in the last five years.
A total of 2,25,620 gave up their citizenship in 2022, said Singh. The number was 1,63,370 in 2021, 85,256 in 2020 and 1,44,017 in 2019.
Chadha also sought to know the steps taken by the government to determine the “financial as well as intellectual drainage” and loss to the country because of the high renouncement of citizenship.
“The government recognises the potential of the global workplace in an era of a knowledge economy,” said Singh. “It has also brought about a transformational change in its engagement with the Indian diaspora.”
The minister added that a “successful, prosperous, and influential diaspora” is an “asset for India”.
“India stands to gain a lot from tapping its diaspora networks and productive utilisation of the soft power that comes from having such a flourishing diaspora,” he said.
Sharing Singh’s written response on social media, Congress MP Jairam Ramesh said that the exodus of high-skilled and high-net-worth Indians is an “economic travesty that will seriously shrink” India’s tax revenue base over the next few years.
“By the government's own data, revealed in the Rajya Sabha, 2.16 lakh Indians gave up their citizenship in 2023, almost double the 123,000 who did so in 2011,” Ramesh said in a post on X.
The Congress leader added that the majority of the Indians who renounced their citizenship are highly skilled and educated. “Their leaving the country at a time of a domestic skilled labour supply shortage will extract a serious toll on our economy,” he said.
In June, a report by investment migration consultancy Henley & Partners said that about 4,300 Indian millionaires are expected to move out of the country in 2024.
Many of the high-net-worth individuals leaving the country are likely to migrate to the United Arab Emirates, the report said. Millionaires and high-net-worth individuals are persons with liquid investable wealth of at least $1 million (or Rs 8.3 crore).
If these projections hold, India will have the third-highest net outflow of millionaires in 2024 after China (15,200) and the United Kingdom (9,500), according to the report.
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