At 94, an NRI Grandmother Gives Up Her US Passport to Come Home for Good

After nearly two decades in Virginia, Kondragunta Mahalakshmamma renounced her American citizenship and is now seeking Indian citizenship so she can spend her final years — and be laid to rest — in her native Bapatla village.

By Newsroom

2 min read Published 25 June 2026 at 08:35 am IST

For most people who emigrate in their later years, the trip abroad is the last big move. For Kondragunta Mahalakshmamma, it was the trip home that mattered most. At 94, she has formally given up her United States citizenship and applied through the government's online portal to become an Indian citizen again, telling officials in Bapatla that her one remaining wish is to die as an Indian in the soil where she was born.

Mahalakshmamma is a native of Chinthagumpala village in Chinaganjam mandal, in Andhra Pradesh's Bapatla district. After her husband Nagabhushanam passed away, she moved to Petersburg, Virginia, to live with her son, Buchaiah Choudhary, a practicing oncologist. She took American citizenship in July 2000 and spent roughly eighteen years building a life in the United States, watching her son's medical career take root in a new country.

But distance from home, she has said, never fully resolved itself into belonging. In 2018, she returned to India, and her decision firmed up further after her son began working at NRI Hospital in Mangalagiri, bringing the family's center of gravity back to Andhra Pradesh. Since then she has lived in her native village, and the pull to formally reclaim her Indian identity only grew stronger with age.

This week she appeared in person before the Bapatla District Collector to press her case and ensure her citizenship application — already filed through the Ministry of External Affairs' online citizenship portal — moves forward without delay. Renouncing a foreign citizenship and being readmitted to Indian citizenship is a documented but often slow bureaucratic process, typically requiring proof of relinquishment of the original citizenship, residency verification, and sign-off at both the state and central government levels.

Stories like Mahalakshmamma's are not unique among India's vast diaspora, where many emigrants who built careers and families abroad in the late twentieth century are now choosing, in their final years, to return to the villages and towns they left decades earlier. What makes her case stand out is the clarity of her stated reason: not healthcare, not finances, but a wish about how and where her life should end. For a 94-year-old who has already crossed continents twice, the request to district authorities was simple — let me finish this, and let me finish it here.