Flag: India Emoji

The flag of India, the Tiranga (literally "tricolor"). A horizontal tricolor of deep saffron, white, and India green in equal proportions, with a navy-blue 24-spoke Ashoka Chakra at the center of the white band. Ratio 2:3.

🇮🇳 is one of the most-used country flag emoji on the planet and it's not just because India has 1.45 billion citizens. The flag also carries the world's largest diaspora: 35.4 million people of Indian origin live outside the country, sending home a record $136 billion in remittances in FY25 alone. Every one of those people owns a share of the 🇮🇳 social footprint.

Cricket is the second engine. The IPL alone moves more 🇮🇳 on social than most countries' entire sporting calendars, and an India-Pakistan match turns 🇮🇳 into the highest-velocity flag emoji on X for hours at a time. Bollywood, Diwali, yoga and wellness content, and Indian food videos on TikTok round out the rest of the daily flag baseline.

The emoji is a regional indicator sequence: U+1F1EE REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER IU+1F1EE REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER I + U+1F1F3 REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER NU+1F1F3 REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER N. It renders as the horizontal tricolor with the Chakra on every supported platform. Unsupported platforms fall back to the letters ININ. Part of Emoji 1.0 (2015), the first set of country flag emoji Unicode shipped.

The design was adopted by the Constituent Assembly on July 22, 1947, three weeks before independence, on a motion from Jawaharlal Nehru that swapped the Indian National Congress's spinning wheel (charkha) for the Chakra so the flag would remain "above party." Official manufacture is restricted by the Flag Code of India to khadi (hand-spun cloth), produced almost entirely at the Karnataka Khadi Gramodyoga Samyukta Sangha in Hubli, the only unit in the country licensed to make the national flag.

🇮🇳 sits at the center of four big social currents: cricket, cinema, diaspora identity, and state-backed patriotism. All four surge at different times, giving the flag one of the most complex usage calendars of any country emoji.

Cricket is the pulsing baseline. The Indian Premier League runs March to May and pushes 🇮🇳 to hourly volume peaks during matches. The ICC T20 World Cup 2024 final, where India beat South Africa in Barbados, sent 🇮🇳 to levels not seen since the 2011 ODI World Cup win. India-Pakistan matches in particular generate weeks of buildup and days of post-match content regardless of who wins.

The diaspora carries 🇮🇳 globally. 35 million people of Indian origin live abroad. The three biggest concentrations are the UAE (around 3.9 million), the US (around 4.8 million), and Saudi Arabia (around 2.6 million). Dubai's Burj Khalifa lights up in the tricolor on August 15. Edison, NJ runs a Little India Day parade on Republic Day. London's Neasden Temple hosts UK Diwali mela that pulls 100,000 visitors. Diaspora posts use 🇮🇳 differently from domestic posts: more explicit nostalgia, more food, more "went home for a wedding" captions.

Bollywood, Tollywood, and Indian cinema. Every Shah Rukh Khan film opening, every Rajinikanth release day, every Hrithik Roshan dance video drops 🇮🇳 into comment sections across 200 countries. The RRR) Oscar win for "Naatu Naatu" in March 2023 spiked 🇮🇳 to a four-year high on X.

State-backed patriotism. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Har Ghar Tiranga ("Flag in Every Home") campaign, launched in August 2022 for the 75th Independence Day, explicitly encourages citizens to post the flag in profile pictures and displays. Republic Day on January 26 and Independence Day on August 15 are the year's two biggest structured 🇮🇳 windows, with the government campaign amplifying each.

Space and soft power. The Chandrayaan-3 soft landing on the lunar south pole in August 2023 generated the biggest single-day 🇮🇳 spike ever measured on Indian social media. ISRO's 🇮🇳 posts regularly break the country's social engagement records.

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  Capital: New Delhi (28.61°N, 77.21°E)
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  Population: ~1.451 billion (2025, world's largest)
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  Area: 3,287,263 km²
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  Currency: Indian rupee (INR, ₹)
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  Languages: Hindi and English are official; 22 scheduled languages
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  Calling code: +91
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  Time zone: IST (UTC+5:30), no DST, single time zone
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  Internet TLD: .in

Foods that show up next to 🇮🇳

Landmarks that anchor travel content

The Tiranga's story runs from hand-loom cotton to the Constituent Assembly. The earliest recognizable draft was the 1921 flag designed by Pingali Venkayya, a freedom fighter and agronomist from Machilipatnam in the Telugu country. Venkayya presented his design to Mahatma Gandhi at the Indian National Congress session in Vijayawada: a red-and-green bicolor with a charkha (spinning wheel) in the center. Gandhi asked him to add a white band between the colors to represent the other communities of India and peace.

The 1931 Congress flag, adopted at Karachi, kept the three bands but ordered them differently and named the colors explicitly: saffron for courage, white for peace and truth, green for faith and chivalry. The charkha remained the central emblem and stayed there through the freedom struggle.

The 1947 switch. On July 22, 1947, three weeks before independence, Nehru moved in the Constituent Assembly that the charkha be replaced with the Ashoka Chakra, the 24-spoke wheel carved on the Lion Capital of Ashoka at Sarnath (circa 250 BCE). Nehru's argument was practical: the charkha was the Congress party's emblem, and a national flag should not look like a party flag. The Chakra was older, deeper in Indian history, and tied to the Buddhist emperor Ashoka's dhamma. The motion passed. The flag was raised for the first time as the national flag on August 15, 1947.

The Chakra itself. The wheel is rendered in navy blue on the white band. The 24 spokes each encode a virtue, time unit, or principle depending on interpretation (love, courage, patience, peace, etc.). The wheel's diameter is equal to 3/4 of the height of the white band. Each spoke is a precise 15 degrees apart.

Flag Code of India. For most of India's history, only government buildings and military installations could fly the flag. A 2002 Supreme Court ruling won by Navin Jindal extended the right to all Indian citizens, and a 2021 amendment to the Flag Code removed the earlier rule that flags had to be made of khadi or cotton alone, now permitting polyester and machine-made flags. The original khadi requirement stays on for ceremonial and government flags. Manufacture is centralized in Hubli, Karnataka, at the KKGSS, the only bureau-certified national flag maker in India.

Har Ghar Tiranga. In August 2022, the Modi government launched the "Flag in Every Home" campaign for the 75th Independence Day, encouraging citizens to fly the tricolor from August 13 to 15 and to change social media profile pictures to the flag. The program repeats every year and has measurably moved 🇮🇳 social volume upward across mid-August.

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  January 26: Republic Day: 1950 constitution adoption. Parade along Kartavya Path in Delhi with armed forces, state tableaux, and military flyover. Major flag-raising day.
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  August 13-15: Har Ghar Tiranga: Modi's Flag-in-Every-Home campaign. Three-day window for profile-picture flag waves and household flag displays.
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  August 15: Independence Day: Prime Minister hoists the flag at Red Fort in Delhi and gives the nation's longest political speech. Year's biggest 🇮🇳 day.
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  October 2: Gandhi Jayanti: Birthday of Mahatma Gandhi. Also the International Day of Non-Violence. Flag at Raj Ghat, national holiday.
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  Late October or early November: Diwali: Five-day festival of lights. Peak family, food, and rangoli post window. Global diaspora celebration.
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  Floating: IPL finals and ICC tournaments: May IPL playoffs; ODI and T20 World Cup finals whenever scheduled. Cricket is the weekly baseline 🇮🇳 driver.

• •The flag is only made in one place: the Karnataka Khadi Gramodyoga Samyukta Sangha in Hubli, Karnataka. It's the only unit in the country licensed by the Bureau of Indian Standards to produce the national flag to IS 1 specifications.
• •India's independence at midnight on August 15, 1947 also saw the flag raised inside a cell at Bhagalpur Jail, where freedom fighter Jayaprakash Narayan was imprisoned. He had the flag smuggled in before his release the next day.
• •The Ashoka Chakra on the flag is directly traced from the wheel on the Lion Capital of Emperor Ashoka, carved around 250 BCE and displayed today at the Sarnath Archaeological Museum near Varanasi.
• •India's diaspora of 35.4 million people is the world's largest. UAE, US, and Saudi Arabia are the top three destinations. Total remittances back to India in FY25 hit a record $136 billion.
• •The flag was carried to the Moon's south pole by Chandrayaan-3 on August 23, 2023, making the Tiranga the first flag to fly at that location. The Pragyan rover imprinted a tricolor Ashoka Emblem onto lunar soil.
• •Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan has been named the most-followed Indian on social media since 2015, reaching over 280 million followers across platforms in 2025. Most of his posts don't include 🇮🇳; the exceptions (Independence Day, Republic Day, cricket wins) are the ones that go viral.
• •The national song 'Vande Mataram' predates the national anthem and was banned by the British in 1905. Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote the anthem 'Jana Gana Mana,' is the only person to have composed the national anthems of two countries (India and Bangladesh).
• •The flag code was amended on December 30, 2021, to permit national flags to be flown at night (previously only sunrise to sunset) and to legalize machine-made and polyester flags for private use.