NRI PULSE STAFF REPORT
Washington, D.C., July 26, 2025 – While more than 10,500 Indian citizens are behind bars across 86 countries, the United States accounts for a relatively small share: just 169 prisoners, according to figures tabled by India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in Parliament this month. These numbers include both those serving sentences and those awaiting trial.
The U.S. ranks far below Gulf nations such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, where thousands of Indians are imprisoned, often on charges of financial fraud, drug offences, or immigration violations. In comparison, American prisons hold barely 1.6 percent of India’s total overseas prison population.
Among these 169 cases, only one stands out for its severity: Raghunandan Yandamuri, a former tech professional from Andhra Pradesh, is the only Indian national on death row in the United States. Yandamuri was convicted in 2014 of kidnapping and murdering a ten-month-old girl and her grandmother in Pennsylvania during a botched ransom plot. His execution, initially scheduled for 2018, has been indefinitely delayed by the state’s moratorium on capital punishment.
Details about the nature of most offences committed by Indians in U.S. prisons remain unclear; American privacy laws restrict the disclosure of nationality-specific crime data.
Separate from criminal incarceration, U.S. immigration authorities detained more than 2,600 Indian nationals last year for violations such as illegal entry and visa overstays.
