NRI & PIO Services Overview

The Person of Indian Origin (PIO) Card Scheme was discontinued by the Government of India effective 9 January 2015, per Ministry of Home Affairs Gazette Notification No. 11 dated 9 January 2015, and merged into the Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) scheme. From that date, all existing valid PIO cardholders were deemed to hold OCI status, and no fresh PIO card applications have been accepted since. The window for physically converting an existing PIO card to an OCI card (without fee) was extended in stages, with the final deadline set at 31 March 2016 — after which an unconverted PIO card ceased to be valid as a travel/entry document, and the holder required a visa to enter India.

OCI status itself is governed by Section 7A of the Citizenship Act, 1955 (inserted in 2005) and the Citizenship (Registration of Overseas Citizen of India Cardholder) Rules, 2009. It is a lifelong, multiple-entry status granting most of the rights of a resident Indian citizen other than voting, holding constitutional office, and (with some exceptions) agricultural land ownership — it is not citizenship and does not confer an Indian passport.

For any client-facing communication, we describe this correctly as PIO status having been absorbed into OCI in 2015, rather than as two live, parallel schemes — a PIO card presented today, if never converted and beyond the 2016 conversion deadline, carries no independent legal standing for Indian entry or residency purposes, and the client's actual status needs to be re-established as OCI (or another applicable visa category) before any related advisory work proceeds.

NRI services is the coordinated suite of compliance for non-resident Indians under the Foreign Exchange Management Act 1999 and the Income-tax Act 1961 — the OCI and the PIO documentation, the NRE, the NRO and the FCNR (B) accounts, the investments in India under the NDI Rules 2019, the property purchases and the sales, the repatriation of the funds, the gifts, the succession and the wills, and the tax returns for the Indian income. The hub is the single engagement through which the NRI manages the Indian side of the financial life.

The NRI's Indian affairs run across two regulatory systems — the FEMA framework for the money and the investments, and the Income-tax Act for the Indian-source income — and the compliance is the coordination of the two. The repatriation limits, the account structures, the property transactions, the gifts and the inheritance each carry their own forms and their own reporting, and each is connected to the others. The NRI who manages the affairs as one position keeps the compliance clean; the one who manages them as separate events finds the gaps where the systems cross.

The cost of the unmanaged NRI position is the regulatory and the tax exposure: the remittances questioned, the property proceeds blocked, the Indian income untaxed and the interest running, the succession that was never planned and the assets stuck.

This service is for NRIs at every stage of the Indian financial life. We map the NRI's Indian positions — the accounts, the investments, the property, the gifts, the succession — manage the FEMA compliance and the tax returns under the Act, handle the OCI and the PIO documentation, and plan the repatriation and the succession so the Indian side of the NRI's life runs without the surprises.