Tax Residency Is Not the Same as Citizenship or a Visa Type
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It is a common assumption that tax obligations follow citizenship or visa status directly, but most tax systems actually determine liability based on a separate concept called tax residency. This is generally assessed using factors such as time spent in a country, the location of a permanent home, and overall ties to that country.
This means a person can hold citizenship of one country while being a tax resident of another, or hold a particular visa without that automatically determining their tax position at all. Each of these statuses, citizenship, visa category, and tax residency, is assessed under a different set of rules and for a different purpose.
For someone moving between India and another country, this distinction becomes practically important, since income earned, assets held, and obligations owed can depend heavily on which country's tax residency tests are satisfied in a given year, rather than simply on where that person happens to hold a passport.
Because residency tests can be detailed and can change, and because a person's circumstances often shift with travel and relocation, this is an area where general understanding is useful but specific confirmation of current status is genuinely worth seeking rather than assuming it stays constant year after year.