A few weeks ago, a post on X stopped thousands of Indians mid-scroll. A user recounted a conversation with a friend settled in Canada — educated, successful, with half a million dollars saved — who said, quietly but clearly: “I’m not coming back.”
Not because he doesn’t love India. But because, after years abroad, he has simply stopped wanting to fight for things that should just work.
The thread exploded. Doctors in Toronto. Engineers in Amsterdam. Nurses in Auckland. Their geographies differed. The emotional core did not: India is exhausting in ways that have nothing to do with poverty, and everything to do with choices made by those in power.
Officially, India loses over 200,000 citizens to emigration every year. Between 2011 and 2023, more than 1.6 million Indians surrendered their passports. In 2024 alone, over 200,000 renounced citizenship. India’s diaspora — 35.4 million strong — is the world’s largest.
In 2024, it sent home US$129 billion in remittances, the highest of any nation on earth. Politicians celebrate this number at glossy diaspora summits. What they never say is what it actually represents: a structural admission that millions of Indians can build better lives outside the country than inside it.
India ranks 134th on the UN Human Development Index. It scores 38 out of 100 on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, lower than Gambia. In the 2024 World Happiness Report, India ranked 126th. Not 26th. Not 56th. 126th. These are not opposition talking points. They are the empirical verdicts of the world watching.
The friction tax
The Indians leaving today are often not the poorest or most desperate. They are the ones with options. And when people with options leave — and stay gone — it tells you something catastrophic about the value proposition of living in the country.
A software engineer who moved to Munich described it this way: “I was earning well in Bengaluru. But I spent three hours a day in traffic, breathing air slowly killing me, and bribing someone for every document. In Munich, I earn less. But I have my evenings. I have clean air. I have a Saturday.”
Call it the friction tax — the invisible daily toll extracted from ordinary Indians just for trying to live a normal life. Delhi’s air routinely crosses AQI 400 — 20 times the WHO safe limit. A 2023 Lancet study estimated air pollution kills over 2.1 million Indians annually. Fourteen of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in India.
This is not a natural disaster. It is regulatory neglect and political cowardice dressed as economic pragmatism. Want to start a business? Budget for unofficial fees at every regulatory checkpoint. Buy land? Hire a fixer or prepare for years of legal uncertainty. This is not an abstract policy failure. It is the theft of dignity at scale — sustained because those who benefit have spent decades ensuring the system is never truly reformed.
The most underreported dimension of India’s brain drain is gendered. Women who have migrated cite not salaries but freedom as their primary motivation — the freedom to walk to a metro at 10 pm without calculating risk, to disagree with a male colleague without social consequence, to not be interrogated at every family gathering about why career matters more than duty.
A public health researcher who left for Canada put it plainly: “India made me feel like I was living in a constant negotiation for the right to exist on my own terms. Abroad, I don’t have to negotiate. I just live.”
A finance professional in the viral thread made the sharpest observation: “This isn’t about lifestyle. It’s about institutional trust.”
India offers nominal investment returns of 9-10% annually, double that of the West. And yet wealthy NRIs park capital overseas. Why? Because policy can reverse overnight. Because what is permitted today may be taxed or restricted tomorrow through a gazette notification on a Friday evening.
India has seen retrospective taxation that spooked foreign capital for a decade. Demonetization erased savings overnight without warning. Sudden GST rollouts and flip-flops on environmental clearances made long-term planning feel like gambling.
Stability is not merely a governance virtue. It is an economic one, and India’s political class, across parties and decades, has treated institutional predictability as optional.
What was promised
The Smart Cities Mission was launched in 2015. A decade on, most Indian cities still flood in July, public transport services serve perhaps 20% of actual commuting demand, and drainage systems collapse under monsoon rains.
India spends 1.9% of GDP on public health — among the lowest in the developing world. Covid exposed what underfunding looks like in practice: oxygen shortages, bodies in hospital corridors, pyres in public parks.
The budget year after that crisis delivered no structural increase in health investment. 47% of Class 8 students cannot do basic division, per ASER’s annual survey. Every major political formation has promised to dismantle the corruption economy.
None has because the corruption economy is, in many places, also the political economy. The officer who demands a bribe is also the voter who must be managed.
Every year, India hosts lavish Pravasi Bharatiya Divas conventions where ministers celebrate remittances, hand out awards, take photographs and fly home. What these summits carefully leave off the agenda is the scale of domestic governance failure that made leaving rational for millions in the first place.
If you genuinely want the diaspora to return, the answer is not more ceremonies. The answer is less corruption, cleaner air, courts that function, contracts that hold, roads that don’t flood. Officials who do their jobs without expecting gratitude in an envelope.
One commenter captured the entire debate in a single sentence: “Fix the system, not the sentiment. The love for India already exists.” It does. The Indians who left are not traitors. Most carry India with them — in food, language, festivals, family calls and an ache that never fully goes away. They did not leave because they stopped caring. They left because they got tired of caring so hard for so little in return.
The question India’s leaders must answer, not at diaspora summits but in budget allocations, legislative calendars, and enforcement records, is this: why should someone who can live anywhere choose here? Until that answer changes, the planes will keep leaving full.
Sachi Satapathy is the director of a development evaluation agency and a columnist on governance, global health and social policy.