Nine sourced country flows out of India — three study destinations (2024 departures, Bureau of Immigration) and six Gulf work destinations (2025 ECR emigration clearances, eMigrate) — drawn from government replies to Parliament and reporting on them. People, per country, per stated year; different measures are never summed.
Students departing during a year counts people leaving India declaring study as purpose (Bureau of Immigration): 6.26 lakh in 2025. Students currently abroad is a stock of everyone enrolled overseas at a point in time: about 1.2 million in 2025. ECR emigration clearances count clearances granted to Emigration Check Required passport holders through eMigrate — mainly blue-collar workers headed to notified countries. Adding any two of these double-counts or mixes flows with stocks.
The work layer therefore undercounts total labour migration: skilled ECNR-passport workers need no clearance and appear in no comparable departure series in the scanned sources. The mapped country rows are a sourced partial view, not a complete list of destinations.
| Destination | Purpose | Year | People | Measure | Source |
|---|
Method: built from three scanned result sets — a 5-row map-ready destination set (3 valid destination rows used; 2 ambiguous national-summary rows excluded), a 54-row candidate evidence set (work rows kept only where the evidence explicitly states eMigrate/ECR emigration clearances with a country and a single stated year — the six GCC rows for 2025), and a 50-row national-source set for the 2023–2025 student departure totals. Cut for space or by rule: district-level Kushinagar clearance rows (multi-year range, no single year), 2019–2022 Gulf clearance rows (kept to one work year to avoid mixing years), growth-delta student rows with no stated year, and stock estimates of students currently abroad other than the one cited. Each number measures people in the stated year under the stated definition; study departures, students abroad, and ECR clearances are different measures and were never combined. Compiled from parliamentary replies and reporting published March 2025 – August 2026.