About BackToIndia

We help NRIs move home — without losing their minds.

BackToIndia started in 2017 as a small forum of homesick engineers, exhausted parents, and one guy (hi, Mani) who moved back and immediately began writing everything down so he'd never have to Google "how to import a car to India" at 2 a.m. again.

Nine years later, that forum is a community of 31,000+ returning NRIs, a library of deeply-researched guides, and a step-by-step planner used by families across 50+ Indian cities. The 2 a.m. Googling, sadly, continues — but at least now other people are doing it too, together.

Why we started

Moving back to India is not one decision. It's about four hundred of them, most of which no one warns you about. School admission cycles. RNOR status. Whether your US 401(k) counts as "foreign asset" (spoiler: yes). Whether the movers will actually show up on moving day (spoiler: define "actually").

Every returnee re-learns the same lessons from scratch, usually the expensive way. We thought: what if we just… wrote it down once? And then let the next person add what they learned? That's the whole product, really. Everything else is packaging.

Mani Karthik with the BackToIndia community and an NPR reporter at a meetup in Hyderabad — Taken during a BackToIndia meetup in Hyderabad, where an NPR reporter showed up and interviewed us about the reverse-brain-drain story.

What you'll find here

Honest guides. Written by people who've actually filed the FBAR, transferred the funds, and enrolled the kids. No sponsored takes. No AI-generated fluff.
A community that gets it. Ask a question about GST on imported household goods, get five answers by lunch — three of them contradicting each other, which is honestly the most Indian experience possible.
A planner that works. Our step-by-step R2I tool at app.backtoindia.com turns "we're moving in nine months" into an actual, checkable list.

What we're not

We're not a law firm, a CA firm, or an immigration consultancy. We're the friend who moved back three years ago and takes your call anyway. For the big legal and tax decisions, please talk to a qualified professional — and if you don't have one, ask the community; someone will know a good one.

Get in touch

Feedback, corrections, story pitches, or a good samosa recommendation in Bangalore — all welcome via our contact page.