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: are against Indian embassy officials in their countries of residence. If MEA is showing greater interest in reaching out to the NRIs and PIOs for certain purpose, it better keep the interests of these people in their country of origin intact.”
However, the fact remains that the NRIs/PIOs are not looking for any special treatment in India. They need to have equal opportunities, similar to other investors and businessmen. As Abraham shares, “Although GOI has been announcing new investment drives, implementation has been slow. There are bureaucratic hurdles. Many NRI investors have shared bad experiences. The problems come when one has to deal with different ministries, ie Finance, Commerce, Industry, Home at the central level and again one has to deal at the state level.”
Since NRIs are a useful bridge to globalisation for India, it is important to undertake fundamental reform of the framework of capital controls concerning the NRIs. As financial analyst Ajay Shah affirms, “The framework of capital controls vis-à-vis NRIs is quite unfair. An NRI holds an Indian passport, but our treatment of capital controls gives them less access to investment in India than we have done for non-Indians (ie the FII framework). There is a maze of bank accounts to navigate. Many times they are able to bring money into India but it’s non-repatriable. That’s unfair. FIIs have more flexibility in the Indian equity market than NRIs.”
For inward remittances too, there remain fundamental gaps that require attention as basic infrastructure to enable recipients to leverage remittances are also lacking. As Vohra puts it, “Most migrants come from rural areas that lack basic infrastructure and access to financial services, either because mainstream banks do not reach out to this segment of the population or because microfinance institutions are not present. Recipients who might be encouraged to start a cottage industry are thus constrained by a lack of a safe place to save the remittances, the ability to leverage them through a loan or the infrastructure to participate in a market. Also, many migrant associations would like to invest back home, but they lack organisational capabilities. In cases where collective remittances have successfully financed a small infrastructure project or business, there has usually been a supportive organisation, such as a local government, a non-governmental organisation or a business group, providing the organisational impetus. Even then the work is challenging, because the informal nature of the migrant groups makes...
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