Refugees in India
overview of legally registered refugees residing in India
Since its independence in 1947, India has accepted various groups of refugees from neighbouring countries, including partition refugees from former British Indian territories that now constitute Pakistan and Bangladesh, Tibetan refugees that arrived in 1959, Chakma refugees from present day Bangladesh in early 1960s, other Bangladeshi refugees in 1965 and 1971, Sri Lankan Tamil refugees from the 1980s and most recently Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. In 1992, India was seen to be hosting 400,000 refugees from eight countries. According to records with the Union Ministry of Home Affairs, as on January 1, 2021, there were 58,843 Sri Lankan refugees staying in 108 refugee camps in Tamil Nadu and 54 in Odisha and 72,312 Tibetan refugees have been living in India.
India does not have a national refugee law, but it has always accepted refugees from neighbouring countries using the principles enunciated by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1959: refugees will be accorded a humane welcome, the refugee issue is a bilateral issue and the refugees should return to their homeland when normalcy returns.
Despite the lack of a formal law, the Supreme Court of India has used the Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Article 13 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to uphold the obligation of refugee protection by the government.
India is not a State Party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, nor has it enacted national legislation to deal comprehensively with refugees. Instead it deals with refugees largely at political and administrative levels, and has only ad hoc systems in place to deal with their status and needs. The legal status of refugees is, therefore, no different from those of ordinary aliens whose presence is regulated by the Foreigners Act of 1946.
History
Over several centuries, the Indian subcontinent has offered shelter to people fleeing from persecution in their homeland.
Parsis, a Zoroastrian community, migrated to the Indian subcontinent due to Islamic persecution between the 12th and 16th centuries.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Refugees in India” as overview of legally registered refugees residing in India. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as overview of legally registered refugees residing in India. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7307672. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1947, 1959, 1965 and 1971.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
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This entry incorporates text from “Refugees in India” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.