ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Indian-Punjabi experience, argues that transnationalism has become a compelling economic imperative manufacturing institutional change at multiple levels with an active involvement of the state. Administrative structures and mechanisms put in place by a nation-state according to its own concerns of development to attract transnational resources together constitute national regimes of transnationalism. The institutional transformation in terms of alterations in administrative frameworks as a result of the potentiality of transnational resources has resulted in changes at the national, sub-national and local levels. The most visible form of economic transnationalism in rural Punjab continues to be the overseas Punjabi investment in their respective ancestral villages. The institutional change has resulted in increased governmental interest in the affairs of overseas Punjabis. Overseas Punjabis themselves, with the support of some natives, formed trusts and charitable societies and funded several institutions in the village for the benefit of their ancestral villages.
