My brother lives in India, I now found a route to remit money to him regularly, not only saving the remittance fee($20-50) but sometimes can still make 2% arbitrage profit. Here is how I do it:

1. I asked my brother to open an account with Unicoin(best funded exchange in the country) in India, need to go through verification process, took about a week.
2. Linked his India local bank account with Unicoin.  
3. I purchased bitcoin with Coinbase or Circle (free with linked bank account).
4. Send bitcoin to my brother Unicoin account.
5. Sell bitcoin (1% fee charge plus tax) and Unicoin will automatically deposit INR proceeds into my brother's linked bank account, normally he is able to sight the INR the same day.

Unicoin's bitcoin prices (bid) is consistently 3-5% higher than Bistamp/Coinbase/Circle's ask prices, so even after all fees, you not only remit the money for free, you still could make 1-3% profit by arbitrage.

This is the best way I ever found to remit money to India and see how bitcoin is going to be a game changer for international remittance and this is just a trivial application. Western Union is dead!