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What Indians should consider before moving to Sweden

After figures showing that more Indians are leaving Sweden than immigrating here went viral last week, we asked The Local's Indian readers for their tips on what Indians should know before moving here. Here's what they said.

Published: 26 August 2024 15:50 CEST
Updated: 31 August 2024 08:09 CEST
What Indians should consider before moving to Sweden
Sweden offers a more relaxed way of life, according to many of The Local's Indian readers – for better or worse. Photo: Fredrik Sandberg/TT

Indians have been one of Sweden’s biggest groups of new immigrants in recent years, but recent statistics suggest that the tide is turning.

Even so, two-thirds of more than 80 respondents told a survey by The Local that they would recommend Sweden to fellow Indians.

Moving to a new country is however always an individual choice, so readers also shared some factors that may help you decide whether Sweden is the place for you.

Cost of living and salaries

As anyone living in Sweden has undoubtedly noticed in recent years, the cost of living here is high, and it’s only got higher over the past few years.

For Indians who may be looking to put away money into savings during their career, this can cause issues.

“Don’t expect that your ambitions and performance will reflect on take-home salary,” said a research engineer in Norrbotten, who wished to remain anonymous.

“Salary increments are next to negligible as a whole. It is more the social structure which one has to relish, which is odd when one comes from India where own savings is a big part of everyone’s life.”

Despite this, the country “works well for people who are planning to live here for the very long term,” a 33-year-old software engineer from Gothenburg wrote.

Work

Despite lower salaries, the better work-life balance, as well as other benefits included in salary, like annual leave, parental leave and insurance, often make up for it.

“Sweden is not a country for high savings or a luxurious life,” a reader named Adarsh told The Local, while adding that there are often “hidden benefits in salary”, like generous annual leave and insurance.

HIDDEN BENEFITS:

“In contrast to the limited vacation days in India, I enjoy at least 33 days of paid vacation annually in Sweden, which helps in recharging and maintaining a healthy work-life balance,” added Dilip Elavazhagan, a senior IT cloud specialist in Stockholm.

Neil Pradhan, a data scientist also working in Stockholm, described the work-life balance in Sweden as “enviable”.

“As an Indian living in Sweden for six years, I have experienced both the advantages and challenges that come with moving to a new country. Sweden offers an enviable work-life balance, a close connection to nature, and excellent infrastructure for physical activities, all of which contribute to a high quality of life. The respect for personal space and freedom to make one’s own decisions without societal pressure is refreshing, as is the generally flat organisational structure that fosters inclusivity and collaboration,” he said.

Having said that, it’s not always easy to get a job in Sweden in the first place, especially when it comes to accompanying spouses, and some readers raised concerns of discrimination against non-Swedish speakers.

READ MORE:

“If you come to India with your spouse, getting a job will be another full time job for you,” a 28-year-old design engineer from Gothenburg said. “Fasten your seatbelts. If you add a child to it, then the burden to provide will be to a point where you question your decision to move to a new country with dependents.”

Climate

Sweden’s climate was mentioned both as a positive and a negative for many survey respondents, with the weather and the winters commonly listed as a drawback.

“The long, cold winters and limited daylight can be challenging for those accustomed to warmer climates,” an anonymous respondent said, although Indian readers have also told us previously that they “love” the Swedish winter weather.

Other readers, like one 42-year-old IT engineer from Gothenburg, praised the country for its “pollution free environment” providing a “better living environment for kids”.

“Noise and pollution is something which impacts you when you travel back home,” wrote a female IoT analyst based in Gothenburg.

“Clean air is a big positive in Sweden,” 30-year-old Sachin, based in Stockholm, said. “In India it has only gotten worse in big cities.”

Education

The Swedish education system was also mentioned as having both benefits and drawbacks, with respondents praising the fact that it is free, while adding that there can be issues with accessing quality education, as well as education in English.

“If you have kids, research the Swedish education system and how it differs from India,” a software architect from Stockholm wrote. You can find the answers to some common questions about the Swedish school system under our ‘schools’ tag.

A 34-year-old data scientist, also based in Stockholm, said that the academic level is not always as good in Sweden as it is in India.

“Children’s education is standardised and consistent across Sweden,” he said. “While sports and extracurricular activities are great, the academic level is poor compared to the good schools in the cities of India. Higher level university education on the other hand is very good in Sweden.”

“Private education in English is very expensive,” a 46-year-old reader based in Stockholm, who moved to Sweden five years ago, added. “The other option is bilingual schools.”

Family

Respondents with children were quick to praise Sweden as a great country for families, although there are drawbacks when it comes to visits from family back home.

“Recommending Sweden to fellow Indians, particularly families, is well-founded due to its supportive family policies, high-quality education system, and safe, healthy living environment,” said Kuhelee Chandel, a researcher and lecturer in Gävle who lives in Sweden with her 11-year-old.

“Sweden offers generous parental leave, affordable childcare, and free education,” she added. “The healthcare system is inclusive and comprehensive, ensuring well-being for all family members. Additionally, the emphasis on outdoor living and the overall safety and stability make Sweden an ideal place for raising children in a nurturing and enriching environment. These factors make Sweden a top choice for Indian families considering a move abroad.”

On the other hand, it’s not always easy to be so far from home, especially considering the fact that it’s so hard for parents in India to get visas to visit their children and grandchildren in Sweden.

“Being far away from family is hard for Indians. The Schengen visa is expensive, hard to apply for and is only given for a limited time,” said Avinash, a senior scientist at AstraZeneca in Mölndal. 

“My mother has visited me in Germany three times and gone back to India within the stipulated time causing no problems,” he added. “Yet, she has to produce all the documents to visit me one more time. There is no path towards a longer visa (for example USA’s ten-year visitor visa option) which makes it unattractive for Indians.”

One respondent, based in Gothenburg, went as far as to say that the government risks losing out on top talent if they don’t provide some sort of visa for visiting parents.

“There are cases where the Swedish Migration Agency denies parents a visa for the short or long term,” he said. “That gives a strong negative message to the Indian community, because for Indians their family is not complete without their parents. We don’t leave them alone in their old age as is done in Sweden.”

“If Sweden would like to attract top talents then they must think about this aspect, otherwise you will see more and more departing Indians. Indians are a great asset to the Swedish economy and if the Swedish government does not consider this a priority then it is going to be difficult for Indians to stay.”

Property

As The Local has reported before, it’s not easy for immigrants to find affordable rentals in Sweden, and the situation is no different for Indians coming to live in the country.

“There is a general shortage of apartments,” wrote 35-year-old Rahul Arora. “The queue for first-hand contracts is huge. Most apartments are tiny with only one toilet. In India, it is common to have an attached toilet with every bedroom.”

“The rental market in Sweden is extremely complicated and outright unfair towards newcomers in the country,” wrote Avinash, the Indian quoted above who is based in Mölndal. 

“For an Indian who has just moved to the country, they won’t be sure about living here for a long time for the first couple of years and therefore would want to rent rather than buy a property. First-hand rentals are nearly impossible to get in the big cities (which is where the jobs for Indians are) and second-hand rentals are way too uncertain. My friend was asked to leave within two months of getting his rental contract. People are paying over 40-50 percent of their monthly income on these rental apartments they find on Blocket or Samtrygg.”

FINDING A HOME:

“If you want to buy a house as a family then it’s better to both have jobs so that you can live a comfortable life (financially). You are at the mercy of interest rates,” senior application architect Harsha Aithal added.

Cultural differences

Culturally, Swedes and Indians are definitely different.

“Sweden has a more individualistic culture, whereas India is more collectivist. Understand the local customs, norms, and values,” one respondent, a software architect in Stockholm, said.

A number of respondents added that “loneliness” was a big issue, with PhD student Sanjay Sukumar describing the country as an “introvert’s paradise”.

MAKING FRIENDS:

“The conflict-avoidance attitude, cold weather and reserved people in Sweden are definitely cons as compared to India,” researcher Bharat Mehta added. “Debating and arguing is part of everyday life in India like negotiating with fruit vendors and arguing for a better workplace environment.”

Despite this, he would still encourage other Indians to make the move.

“Even though Sweden and Swedes sound culturally opposite to India, the whole idea is to be open-minded if you are planning to leave India,” he said. “This, to multicultural and multilingual Indians would be relatively easy in my opinion! If you open your mind, Sweden is a beautiful country with nice (albeit reserved) people, a working public system and better overall quality of life.”

Thank you to everyone who replied to our survey. We received more than 80 responses so weren’t able to include them all, but we tried to pick a representative sample. If you would like to add your own thoughts to the conversation, please feel free to do so in the comments below.

If you have any future ideas, feedback or questions about life in Sweden for The Local’s editorial team, you’re always welcome to email news@thelocal.se. 

Member comments

  1. wide ranges of opinions, but i would be very curious to know how many acquired swedish citizenship before returning back to india ? having said that. still hands down best decision ever for me to move to sweden

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INDIANS IN SWEDEN

Interview: Indians leaving Sweden only ‘a temporary fluctuation’

The engineering services company Siri AB has been recruiting high-skilled Indian workers to Sweden from its office in Gothenburg for years. They told The Local that talk of an Indian 'exodus' from Sweden is exaggerated.

Published: 16 September 2024 10:09 CEST
Interview: Indians leaving Sweden only 'a temporary fluctuation'

When The Local reported last month that Sweden was in the first six months of 2024 seeing net emigration of Indian citizens for the first time in that period since records began, the media in India sensationalised the story to such an extent that Nrusimha Kiran Pathakota, business strategy manager at Siri AB, had to fend off worried calls from home. 

“It picked up quite a bit of steam in India, and then it also got merged with the other news, like the crime rate, and we started getting calls from some of our friends and relatives. Is everything fine in Sweden?” he told The Local. “The news did spread across the spectrum, and it got picked up by a lot of vernacular news channels. I could see at least 10 or 15 channels covering the story.” 

But according to Pathakota and the company’s global business director Aditya Mylavarapu, while there have been some major layoffs at big companies that employ Indian software engineers, there’s no sign of an exodus of high-skilled Indians. 

“I think these statistics definitely highlight a shift,” Mylavarapu said. “But from where we stand and what we see on the ground, we believe it is a temporary fluctuation rather than a long-term trend.”

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For a start, as The Local also reported, some of the Indian citizens registered as leaving Sweden in the first part of the year may have left earlier and then been included in this year’s statistics due to the Swedish Tax Agency’s checks on the population register.

But even those that have left, Mylavarapu said, were more likely to have done so because they lost residency permits than because of dissatisfaction with the country.

The redundancies announced last year by major employers, he explained, had taken an unusually long time to carry out, meaning many Indians’ permits had expired before they had a chance to get another job. 

“I think 2023 saw the longest layoff period – not in terms of the number of layoffs, but in the time it took to start and end it,” he said. “Because of this extended time period, people who got laid off struggled to find another job,” he said.

YOUR SWEDISH CAREER:

Siri AB and other potential employers, Mylavarapu explained, usually wait until a redundancy process is over before swooping in and trying to hire those who have been laid off.

“We tend to wait and watch until the layoff completes before we start planning the next step,” he explained. “And most other players would have been going with the same approach: let’s wait and watch until this whole thing comes to an end, and then we will start recruiting.”

But in early 2024, this approach backfired, as many work permit holders had not managed to find a job within the three-month window they are given under their work permits.

“Most work permit holders have only three months to find a job before they have to leave, so you could attribute some of these data shifts to that.” 

No big changes to make Sweden less attractive 

Erik Hult, Siri’s sales manager, said that the tightening of immigration policy under the current government and the higher salary threshold for a work permit, had had only a minimal impact on the attractiveness of Sweden for the Indians professionals the company hires. 

“In our case, this has not affected us since we work with high-skilled competence, where the salary levels are higher,” he said. 

Efforts to speed up work permit processing times for high-skilled workers were at the same time removing one of the barriers.  

“I wouldn’t say that it has made Sweden more attractive, yet. But it makes it more competitive,” he said. “For us as a company it makes a difference in being able to provide talent to our customers at shorter lead time.” 

READER INSIGHTS:

Mylavarapu said that Indians already living and working in Sweden didn’t feel less welcome as a result of the “paradigm shift” in migration policy. 

“On the ground and in my social circles, I have not heard anything bad about Sweden that turned 180 degrees in the last few years,” he said. “In the last 13 odd years we’ve hired about 250 people, and only a handful of people – I can count them on one hand – have left to go back to India, and most of them went to take care of aging parents. Other than that, most have made a decision to settle down here.” 

The gang crime issues that featured in the many of the reports on Indian TV had not, he added, changed the attitudes of high-skilled Indian workers.

“The reports about the crime rate in Sweden have had an impact on how Indians in India perceive Sweden, not Indians living in Sweden, because it has never affected them directly,” he said.  

What did make a difference was the weak krona, however, with “very, very high inflation” obvious when buying groceries.

Innovation and quality of life the big advantage

But there are career opportunities available in Sweden that are hard to find elsewhere, at least outside of Silicon Valley, Pathakota said. 

“Innovation in Sweden is very high, and that is probably the reason why most Indians look at Sweden. There are so many companies that are innovating here and that is quite an attraction.” 

For Siri AB, the challenge over the past 13 years has been to make highly-skilled Indians see Sweden as a good place to move to. 

“For us, for a long time, the competition is not about attracting talent to Siri, but attracting talent to Sweden, and what Sweden has in its favour is the work-life balance and the easy ways of working. I read somewhere that India and Sweden are two countries of different sizes, but almost similar mentality and I can see that.” 

Size of economy, spouse jobs and slow medical care

The biggest downside to Sweden as a place for Indians to work, he said, was the small size and concentration of the economy, which means employment tends to be less stable than in the US or Germany, with the few really big employers often hiring or enacting redundancy programmes at the same time.  

“The fluctuations are way too steep and way too fast, while for a country like Germany, the ups and downs can be more easily managed. For a typical person, it is easy to find another job,” Pathakota said.  

READERS SUGGEST:

The small size of the economy also poses a problem for Indian couples where there are two highly skilled workers, only one of which has been offered a job in Sweden. 

“We’re talking about people who are engineering graduates, managers and medical specialists, or software engineers, and then generally, they tend to marry people who have the same skills, and sometimes it is a challenge to get a job for the spouse at a level equal to their skills.” 

What could Sweden do to make itself more attractive? 

Back in India, healthcare can be expensive but getting an appointment and scheduling an operation is fast compared to the long waits common in Sweden, something Mylavarapu said many Indians living in Sweden found frustrating. 

“We have had a few employees over the past few years who ran into some medical emergencies, and once they are into the hospital, they have nothing but praise. They have not seen a system so accommodating and compassionate,” he said.

“But getting into the door has become more and more difficult to the extent that some people I know went back to India to get medical treatment. That is becoming a sensitive point. If there is something that government can do about that, I think it would be a big win.” 

Pathakota, meanwhile, believes that the country should consider bringing in a different taxation system for people on short-term work permits, like the “30 percent ruling” in The Netherlands, or perhaps a tax rebate like the one Germany has been considering.

“The whole tax system in this part of the world – in Sweden and probably in Germany as well – is designed for life,” he said. “You get the real benefits as you age. As you get old, the country will take care of you.” 

EXPLAINED:

This can be a problem for Indians who often intend to return to India before retirement, as on top of paying tax for an old age they probably won’t end up spending in the country, they often also send money back to India to support elderly relatives. 

Whether or not Sweden’s government takes any new actions to attract high-skilled labour, Siri AB expects Indians to continue to come to the country, with the emigration in the first half of the year a temporary slump in a long-term upward trend.  

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