This year’s Pravasi Bharatiya Divas has taken place in the shadow of growing concerns over the security of people of Indian origin (PIOs) in Malaysia and Kenya. In his speech at the three-day event in Delhi, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has rightly assured Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) and PIOs that India will extend more than a helping hand to those who are caught in crisis situations abroad.

To give substance to this assurance, the government has launched a helpline for potential migrant workers and a grievance redressal-cum-intervention mechanism for overseas workers in distress. Whether as in Fiji, where ethnic Indians are vulnerable to institutionalised discrimination or in Malaysia, where the future of tens of thousands of Indians hangs in the balance with the government proposing a ban on Indian workers, Indians abroad are facing uncertain future. The effort to have mechanisms in place to secure Indians abroad rather than jump in when crisis explodes is laudable.

In previous years, NRIs and PIOs have been courted at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas to invest in businesses in India, in the country’s amazing growth story. This time, their attention was drawn to the ‘other India’. NRIs and PIOs have been called on to participate in the country’s socio-economic development, to help pull India’s rural population out of poverty.

The government has set up the India Development Foundation, a charitable non-profit trust, to channel philanthropic capital into the country. This is a welcome step. In the past Indians abroad have unwittingly ended up contributing funds to organisations that unleash communal violence in the country. They were contributing money to “development funds” or “charities” that were fronts for other activities. The India Development Foundation should go some way towards eliminating that problem.

As in previous years, it is Indians in the United States who dominated Pravasi Bharatiya Divas 2008. Since last year, the government has rightly recognised the contributions of Indians in the Gulf as well. Their remittances have been substantial.

However, it is unfortunate that the small but significant role that the Indians in China, for instance, are playing continues to be ignored. Their contribution has gone by completely unnoticed and unrecognised at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas. The Indian government must go beyond viewing only wealth and numbers in determining the contribution of overseas Indians to further India’s development and interests.