An Australian newspaper recently ran a headline saying: “Singh beats Smith.” It was about business ownership in Sydney, but it highlighted the steady shift in how the Indian diaspora, now estimated at more than 35 million people spread across more than 200 countries, is becoming a force.
Last month, members from 25 countries gathered in Bengaluru for the Indiaspora Forum — venture capitalists alongside Paralympic athletes, AI researchers alongside art collectors, and policymakers sharing space with meditation teachers. The range was the point.Build slowly, intentionallyIndiaspora was founded in 2012 by entrepreneur MR Rangaswami. “We were not an overnight success,” Rangaswamy said. “Nonprofits vary in size, it’s been slow and steady.”
This patience has produced something lasting. Since its origins in the United States, the organization now works across what Rangaswamy calls the “big six” diaspora centers: the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and Singapore. Its annual forum has become one of the few areas where the Indian community’s breadth of influence – not just its economic weight – is seriously examined.Rangaswami seeks to keep the forum free of the transactional energy that dominates most professional gatherings.
“We want this event to be a non-transactional event,” he said in his keynote address. “It’s not about selling to each other. It’s not about promotion. It’s really about learning about, understanding and enhancing your area of knowledge, and promoting more of what you know about other things going on in the world.”
“That philosophy was visible on stage. Art collector Kiran Nadar discussed her new museum in Delhi. Shri Shri Ravi Shankar led the meditation sessions.
Tennis legend Vijay Amritraj joined a group of athletes – including a Paralympian – to discuss India’s bid to host the 2036 Olympics.The link is missingFor Asif Ismail, CEO and publisher of American Bazaar, Indiaspora fills a gap that has gone unaddressed for too long. Regional associations—the Gujarati Samaj, Telugu organizations, and others—have been around for decades, but their focus has tended to be narrow and community-specific. “Before that, there was nothing that linked diaspora together globally,” he said.The organization made an early mark with a high-profile inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2013, and has since grown into a professionally run network with staff drawn largely from corporate backgrounds. But it did not lose the fabric of society. Rangaswamy recalls a recent case of a member in the United States who needed to travel to India for a funeral but could not, because her newborn did not yet have a passport. “Our members helped organize it,” he said.On political matters, this approach is similarly underrated. Migration obstacles, geopolitical tensions, mobility concerns – these are all live issues for diaspora communities everywhere. “We are not applying public pressure,” Rangaswamy said. “But we work privately with governments, conveying concerns and facilitating dialogue.”More than money transfersFor many years, the story of the Indian diaspora has been told primarily through remittances – the billions of dollars sent home annually.
The Indiaspora Impact report, launched at this year’s forum, claims this framework is too small.The numbers it presents are staggering in their specificity: 76% of foreign angel investors backing Indian startups are expatriates, operating in 56 countries. More than 60% of the Indian NGOs surveyed received donations from diaspora; More than half have used diaspora networks to access global institutional funding.
Nearly one in five internationally syndicated research papers include a diaspora connection.Then there’s the hard-to-measure impact — yoga studios popping up in every American suburb, Indian cinema crossing language barriers, cuisine becoming commonplace in cities that once seemed exotic. “It’s not just about the money,” Rangaswamy said. “It’s about influence, culture and ideas. We have to measure the hard and soft power of the diaspora.”Why BengaluruThe choice of the host city was deliberate. Last year’s forum was held in Abu Dhabi. This year, Indiaspora wanted to bring the conversation back to India and what better place than the IT hub of Bengaluru. As Rangaswamy puts it, “Bengaluru represents the new India – technology-driven, global and forward-looking.”The organization now runs programs throughout the year — climate summits, global health discussions focused on conditions like diabetes and heart disease that disproportionately affect South Asians, and a new initiative called Indiaspora Next, designed to bring younger members of the diaspora into networks that have historically been led by an older generation.Sri Srinivasan, the organization’s ambassador, says that what keeps people coming back is not communication. “Networking may attract people, but it’s the ideas and inspiration that keep them coming back.” He describes the forum’s core asset as the ability to convene – something that resists easy digitization. “One of the great skills of the 21st century is bringing people together,” he said. “You can do it online, but when people from 25 countries come together in one place, the ideas and relationships deepen in a different way.
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