Archive: Modi Announces PIO-OCI Merger at Madison Square Garden

From the TI archives — originally published September 2014.

On September 28, 2014, Narendra Modi walked into a packed Madison Square Garden — some 20,000 people from the Indian diaspora — and made a promise that mattered deeply to them.

PIO card holders would get lifelong visas to India, he announced, to cheers and chants of "Modi, Modi." NRIs staying in India for long periods would no longer have to report to the local police station. And the two diaspora schemes — People of Indian Origin (PIO) cards and Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) cards — would be merged into one.

"Happy?" he asked the crowd, smiling. "There is even more to come."

He also announced that Indian missions in the US would grant long-term visas to American citizens, and that US tourists would get visa-on-arrival in India — a pledge that became the electronic visa-on-arrival scheme rolled out that November.

The promises were real ones. In January 2015, the Indian government formally merged the PIO and OCI schemes — all PIO cards were deemed equivalent to OCI, and cardholders got lifetime multiple-entry visas as promised.

For the diaspora, it was the beginning of a relationship: the prime minister who came to their arena and rewrote their paperwork. The PIO card — with its 15-year validity and periodic renewals — is gone now, absorbed into the OCI system he described that day.