Nearly one million Indians became citizens of OECD countries in five years
Naturalizations jumped 41 percent with Canada up 150 percent, new migration from India fell 19 percent in 2024 as the UK flow halved
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Representative image. Indians at a Canadian education fair
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Narinder Nanu/AFP
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More than 900,000 Indians acquired citizenship of OECD countries between 2020 and 2024, according to data released by the 38-country bloc — a 41 percent rise on the 650,000 who took passports in 2015-2019. Canada alone naturalized 260,000, an increase of 150 percent on the previous five years.
Naturalization is the last stage of a filter that begins with a visa: years of residence, fees and tests stand between arrival and a passport. The citizenship count is therefore a ledger of the solvent and the pre-screened, not the desperate. Canada, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand were the top five destinations, together handing passports to nearly 230,000 Indians in 2024 alone. India's foreign ministry, answering Parliament in December 2025, counted roughly 900,000 renunciations over the same five years: 85,256 in 2020, then about 160,000, 220,000, 210,000 and 200,000 in the years that followed. What the ledger records leaving is the mobile and the established — the citizens with the means and paperwork to go.
The flow behind that stock is thinning. Migration to the OECD declined in 2024, yet India remained the bloc's top country of origin; Indian migration to the OECD fell 19 percent, sharper than the global average decline of 4.7 percent, with the halving of the United Kingdom's intake to 66,000 the main cause. One destination's tightening moved the whole number. Permanent migration across the bloc fell a further 1.6 percent in 2025.
The pipeline is students. India was the second-largest source of students at OECD universities in 2024, with 820,000 enrolled, behind China's 850,000 — a count that has nearly quadrupled since 2015. Today's enrollment figures are the naturalization statistics of the 2030s.
For the receiving states, each passport formalizes years of fees, tests and taxes already paid in; the sending state is left counting its departures in answers to Parliament.
In 2024 fewer than half a million Indians moved to OECD countries. In the same year nearly 230,000 Indians already living in the top five destinations collected their passports.