It is a familiar story. Someone leaves India for a job in their mid twenties, still holding the resident demat account they opened as a student. A few years in, they open an NRO account at whichever bank is convenient. A few years after that, once they are earning enough to invest seriously, they open a PIS account and an NRE demat account at a different bank entirely, because that is where a colleague banks. Two decades abroad later, they have three or four scattered account

Any NRI who wants to buy and sell listed Indian shares on a delivery basis and eventually send the money home runs into the same requirement: a Portfolio Investment Scheme account, commonly shortened to PIS. It is not optional, it is not a premium add on, and it is the specific mechanism through which the Reserve Bank of India keeps track of how much of an Indian company NRIs collectively own. What is less well understood is that the scheme itself changed twice in the past ei

An Indian mutual fund that looks perfectly ordinary to someone living in India becomes something else entirely the moment that person becomes a US tax resident. Under the US Internal Revenue Code, it becomes a Passive Foreign Investment Company, or PFIC, one of the most punitive corners of the entire US tax system, and almost every Indian mutual fund qualifies without exception. What makes this genuinely difficult, rather than simply unfamiliar, is that the two elections Cong

Ask an NRI in Dubai, one in New York and one in London what their India tax treaty actually does for them, and you get three very different answers, because the treaties themselves are solving three very different problems. The India UAE treaty exists mostly to allocate taxing rights between two countries, one of which, until recently, barely taxed individuals at all. The India US treaty operates inside a system where the United States taxes its own citizens on worldwide inco

You have spent a decade working abroad, building a career, sending money home, watching your parents age. Somewhere along the way you start thinking seriously about what comes after: retirement, and where you want to spend it. India keeps pulling at you, and so does the question of whether the financial foundations you laid here still have a place for you. One product that comes up, particularly among NRIs who grew up watching their parents rely on government pensions, is the

Filing an Indian income tax return as an NRI is meaningfully different from filing as a resident Indian, not because the portal or the form changes, but because what you are required to declare, what you are not required to declare, what TDS has already been deducted on your behalf, and what treaty claims you may be entitled to make are all different. Many NRIs either skip the filing entirely on the mistaken belief that TDS deducted at source settles their Indian tax obligati

The Public Provident Fund is a government-backed savings scheme established under the PPF Act of 1968 and currently governed by the Public Provident Fund Scheme, 2019. It is open to Indian residents and offers a combination of features that make it one of the most attractive fixed-income instruments available in India. The interest rate is set by the government each quarter and has historically ranged between 7 and 8 percent, compounded annually. The minimum annual contributi

You have been watching Indian markets from abroad, following company results, tracking indices, reading about sectors you know well from your years working in India. The question that eventually surfaces is whether you can do more than watch. Can you actually buy and sell Indian stocks directly, the way you did when you were a resident? The answer is yes, but the mechanics are more involved than simply opening a brokerage account, as a resident Indian would. NRIs can invest d

An OCI cardholder is a foreign national who holds a lifelong visa to India. They are not an Indian citizen. This single fact is the root of the differences between OCI and NRI investment rules. The question comes up in almost every conversation about NRI investing once the audience is broad enough: do OCI cardholders follow the same rules as NRIs? The answer is almost yes, with several important exceptions that are easy to miss and some of which carry significant financial an