NEW DELHI: The government has quietly readied yet another ordinance — this one to merge the PIO and OCI cards — to make good a promise made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visits to the US and Australia when he vowed to make it easier for the Indian diaspora to connect with their homeland.The home ministry will soon bring an ordinance to amend the Indian Citizenship Act of 1955 and a senior official said this was likely to be done before January 7 inauguration of the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas in Gandhinagar. This will mark a fresh test to accepted political conventions for passing legislations using the ordinance route and could expose the government to criticism that it was disregarding Parliament.The upcoming ordinance is expected to specify a date by which existing PIO (Persons of Indian Origin) cardholders will be deemed as having the rights and privileges enjoyed by Overseas Citizens of India (OCI).Modi had promised, most recently in his Sydney speech to the Indian diaspora on November 17, that the PIO and OCI cards would be merged within two months. The home ministry had introduced the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2014 in the Lok Sabha earlier this month but it could not be taken up due to frequent disruptions.The thinking in the government, officials said, was that if it decided to wait until the next session in February, the promise would not be met. “It will be an embarrassment if the PIO-OCI cards are not merged by then. Hence, the home ministry has prepared an ordinance as a gift to NRIs,” a home ministry official told ET, adding that the upcoming Pravasi Bharatiya Divas gave the government the perfect setting to make good the PM’s promise.The home ministry official said the ordinance would be presented to the union cabinet for clearance very soon, preferably as early as in its next meeting. Modi has for long aggressively courted the Indian diaspora, many of whom are financially well off in their ed nations, to invest in India. His public meetings during his visits abroad as PM have been well attended and his election campaign too also saw the involvement of large numbers of Indian expatriates.The PIO and OCI cards are expected to be merged into a new scheme that will be called Indian Overseas Cardholder and will retain many of the features of the OCI, which is more popular among Indian expatriates because it allows them to have a lifelong Indian visa and financial privileges applicable to nonresident Indians. A PIO card-adoptholder by comparison could only stay in Indian for six months at a time. The government has issued nearly 53,000 PIO cards so far, while around 10 lakh people have been granted OCI status.The planned ordinance will also involve amendments to allow foreigners breaks for a period not exceeding 30 days during the prescribed one-year stay in the country before they can apply for Indian citizenship. At present, foreign nationals marrying Indians cannot leave the country even for a single day during the one-year period before applying for citizenship.