Gifting money across the India-US corridor — most commonly a parent in India sending money to a child settled in the US, or the reverse — runs into two entirely separate rule sets: India's income-tax treatment of gifts on the recipient's side, and a US information-reporting requirement that applies regardless of whether any US tax is actually owed on the gift itself.
India's side: it depends who's giving
Under Section 56(2)(x) of the Income-tax Act, gifts received from a defined list of "relatives" (parents, spouse, siblings, and certain other specified relations) are fully exempt from tax in India regardless of amount. Gifts from anyone outside that relative definition are taxable as the recipient's income once they exceed ₹50,000 in aggregate for the financial year, generally taxed at the recipient's slab rate. Whether someone counts as a "relative" under this specific definition is worth checking carefully — it's narrower than the everyday meaning of family.
The US side: reporting, not gift tax, for the recipient
On the US side, a gift received from a foreign person generally isn't income to the recipient and doesn't trigger US income tax by itself — but if you're a US person receiving gifts from a nonresident alien (or a foreign estate) totaling more than $100,000 in a year, you're required to report it on Form 3520, itemizing each individual gift over $5,000. Gifts from multiple foreign individuals who are related to each other (say, both parents) are aggregated together against that $100,000 threshold, not counted separately per giver. Missing this filing carries a real penalty — commonly cited at up to 25% of the gift's value — even though no tax was actually due on the gift itself.
The two sides of this don't cancel each other out or need to match: India's ₹50,000/relative-exemption test and the US's $100,000 Form 3520 reporting threshold are independent tests answering different questions, and a transfer can clear one comfortably while still needing attention on the other.