India has historically been the leading country of origin of international migrants, with an estimated 32 million overseas Indians in 2018, including 19 million Persons of Indian Origin (PIO) and 13 million Non-Resident Indians (NRIs). This chapter looks at how India initially adopted a policy of limited engagement with Indians abroad due to limited material capacities to support a large and diverse overseas community. In reaction to the emergence of an increasingly rich and influential Indian diaspora in the OECD countries, and as India’s own material capacities grew, the chapter then describes how the Government of India sought since the early 1990s to actively co-opt its community abroad by providing more consular services and by redesigning its diaspora policies and institutions. The chapter shows that the expansion of India’s consular support services has also been driven by the need to ensure stable remittances from low-skilled migrants. Also noted is how the Indian government has developed repressive tools against Indians abroad whom it considers to be a threat to its national sovereignty and integrity. This chapter concludes that, despite the design of new policies to engage nationals abroad, limited material resources devoted to these initiatives have in turn limited their implementation and success.

The conclusion of a relationship agreement between the IOM and the UN in 2016, alongside the organisation’s rebranding to ‘UN Migration’, gave the appearance of a significant shift in a normative direction, but was it? And what are the implications for people displaced by climate change? The IOM has never been a UN agency. In fact, characteristic features of the IOM that set it apart from the UN are preserved in the 2016 Agreement, including the express retention and acknowledgement of its institutional independence. Moreover, the UN and the IOM are oriented to achieve quite different goals. Whereas the mandate of the UN is normative and protective, fundamentally concerned with upholding human rights, the constitutional mandate of the IOM is ‘to make arrangements for the organized transfer of migrants’ and to provide various migration services ‘at the request of and in agreement with the States concerned’. Accordingly, the IOM’s adoption of the UN name and logo could be misleading.