The report says there are nearly 2 lakh refugees in India

Over 7,000 people from India filed applications for asylum in the US last year, according to a report by the UN refugee agency which said America was the largest recipient of new asylum requests in 2017.

The UN Refugee Agency said in its annual Global Trends report that 68.5 million people globally were displaced as of the end of 2017. Among them were 16.2 million people who became displaced during 2017 itself, either for the first time or repeatedly. Wars, other violence and persecution drove worldwide forced displacement to a new high in 2017 for the fifth year in a row, led by the crisis in Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan’s war, and the flight into Bangladesh from Myanmar of thousands of Rohingya refugees.

Nationalities from which there were over 5,000 claims in 2017 were Mexico (26,100), China (17,400), Haiti (8,600) and India (7,400). Altogether, claims were received from nationals from 168 countries, the report said.

As per the report, there were 1,97,146 refugees as at 2017 end in India and 10,519 asylum seekers with pending cases. There are about 40,391 asylum seekers from India at the end of last year, the report said.

The highest number of asylum claims were filed by nationals of Afghanistan who submitted 1,24,900 claims in 80 countries.

