Long before she became the first Indian woman in space, a girl in Karnal followed her father to a local flying club and watched planes lift into the sky.
In November 1997, that girl, Kalpana Chawla, looked down on Earth from Space Shuttle Columbia, and she said the view made her feel less like someone from one patch of land and more like someone from the solar system.
Her journey set a template that many people with Indian roots have followed since, in orbit, in laboratories, in hospitals and in the rooms where global institutions decide how the world should run.
Most of them now carry another country’s passport. But for people like them, India created the Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) card, a lifelong link to the country their families came from.
This list gathers 10 changemakers, five women and five men, who fit that description and were chosen for work that served the world rather than personal fortune.
But what does OCI mean?
OCI is a lifelong, multiple-entry visa for people of Indian origin who hold another country’s citizenship.
It is not dual citizenship: cardholders cannot vote or hold constitutional posts, but they can live and work in India indefinitely. Anyone who was, or was eligible to become, an Indian citizen on or after 26 January 1950, and their descendants, can apply.
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Kalpana Chawla, the astronaut who flew first
Born in Karnal in 1962, Chawla became the first Indian woman in space aboard Space Shuttle Columbia in 1997.
Chawla’s journey from Karnal to NASA continues to inspire young Indians, particularly girls,
to pursue careers in science and aerospace. Photograph: (Asian American Historical Society)
She died on 1 February, 2003 when Columbia broke up on re-entry, having logged 30 days, 14 hours, and 54 minutes in space.
The US Congress awarded her its Space Medal of Honor posthumously, and a cargo spacecraft launched to the International Space Station in October 2020 carried her name.
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Abhijit Banerjee, the economist who tested poverty
Banerjee studied at the University of Calcutta and Jawaharlal Nehru University before earning his doctorate at Harvard. He won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for an experimental approach to alleviating poverty, built on randomised controlled trials.
He co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab in 2003, and he shared the Nobel with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer.
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Sunita Williams, the record-setting spacewalker
Williams, whose father hails from Gujarat, received the Padma Bhushan in 2008.
She completed nine spacewalks totalling 62 hours and 6 minutes, the most by any woman, and retired from NASA on 27 December, 2025 after 608 days in space.
On earlier missions, she carried a Ganesha idol and samosas, a reminder of her heritage.
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Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, the chemist who mapped the ribosome
Born in Chidambaram in 1952, Ramakrishnan shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for mapping the ribosome, the cellular machinery that builds proteins.
Understanding the ribosome’s structure has helped researchers investigate how antibiotics
interact with bacteria and how resistance can develop. Photograph: (TNM)
That structure has proved important in the production of antibiotics.
He studied physics at Baroda University before moving to the United States for his doctorate.
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Gita Gopinath, the economist who broke an IMF barrier
Born in Kolkata in 1971, Gopinath became the first woman to serve as chief economist of the International Monetary Fund in October 2018.
She later served as its first deputy managing director from 2022 to 2025 before returning to Harvard.
She studied at Delhi University before earning her PhD at Princeton in 2001.
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Atul Gawande, the surgeon behind a checklist
Gawande led the World Health Organization effort behind the surgical safety checklist, tested in eight hospitals worldwide, from a major academic centre in the United States to a rural facility in Tanzania.
A study published in January 2009 found that major complications fell by 36% and deaths by 47%, with in-hospital mortality falling from 1.5% to 0.8%.
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Priyamvada Natarajan, the astrophysicist who maps dark matter
Born in Coimbatore and raised in Delhi, Natarajan teaches at Yale. Her work on dark matter and black holes earned her a place on Time’s 2024 list of the 100 most influential people and the 2025 Dannie Heineman Prize in Astrophysics.
Natarajan’s research explores how supermassive black holes form and how dark matter shapes the universe’s large-scale structure. Photograph: (Deccan Herald)
Her proposed pathway for forming black hole seeds in the early universe has since been supported by data from the James Webb Space Telescope.
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Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General who named loneliness
As US Surgeon General, Murthy issued an advisory on 2 May, 2023 warning that loneliness and isolation had become a major public health concern for Americans.
He had earlier testified before the US Senate Finance Committee on youth mental health care, on 8 February, 2022.
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Indra Nooyi, the executive who tied profit to purpose
Born in Chennai in 1955, Nooyi led PepsiCo from 2006 to 2018 and was the first woman of colour and immigrant to head a Fortune 50 company.
Her Performance with Purpose strategy linked growth to healthier products, and India honoured her with the Padma Bhushan in 2007.
She stepped down as chief executive in October 2018 and as chairman in early 2019.
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Sudhir Parikh, the doctor who served communities
Parikh, a Gujarat-born doctor based in the United States, won the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman in 2006 and received the Padma Shri in 2010 for social service.
Alongside his medical career, Parikh has supported
social causes, earning recognition from both the Indian and
Indian diaspora communities. Photograph: (India.com)
He is also known for his expertise in treating asthma and allergies.
Why these stories matter
Read together, these 10 lives cover remarkable ground, from the silence of orbit to the operating theatres where a checklist cut deaths by 47%, and from the protein factory inside a cell to the daily choices of a poor family.
India has honoured several of them, with Padma awards going to Williams, Nooyi and Parikh, yet each story reaches beyond any award because the work itself serves people far from where it began.
Chawla carried a childhood fascination with planes and flight into orbit, Banerjee turned poverty into a question that experiments could answer, and Ramakrishnan turned the structure of proteins into a map that doctors can use today.
Their stories remind us how a connection to India can travel across continents and still carry the same wish to help people beyond one country, all with an OCI card.
