According to recent estimates, there are about 25 million non-resident ethnic Indians worldwide. The British brought Indians from around the world as servants to countries like Australia, Malaysia and South Africa. They were even brought as servants to Latin America and the Caribbean. There are many Indians in Trinidad and Tobago and they are the second most common ethnic community in Jamaica behind Africans.
Currently, the wealthy gulf states have employed many Indians in countries like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to work as construction workers. The United States and the United Kingdom employ them as IT professionals.
The great Indian community throughout the world will still have a great Indian family in the motherland. They stay in touch by email, phone and SMS.
Email services are free, but can only be addressed to those in India who have an Internet connection. Although it is 2009, a large number of Indians still do not have access to the Internet and those who do have only a few minutes to go to an Internet cafe.
Telephone services can be quite expensive and with time differences it is not always practical. There are ways to make free phone calls when both people are online and talking through MSN or Yahoo.
With SMS, you can’t write as much as email and it’s not as personal as phone service. The advantages of this is that it is convenient and more available to Indians than anything else. If you send an SMS message using your cell phone’s delivery service, it would cost you 20 cents. With Skype, it would cost 15 cents. But now there are reliable websites on the net that provide free SMS services to anyone in India.