India Visa 2026: Which Route Applies to You

Cruise itineraries calling at Mumbai, Goa (Mormugao) or Mangalore on Indian-government-approved vessels are a special case: passport holders from a defined list receive a port-of-call e-Visa equivalent on arrival. It covers shore-day excursions only — you cannot disembark and continue inland on the same itinerary. Travellers planning to step off the ship for the full Indian programme need a regular Tourist e-Visa filed in advance.

Three other categories run alongside the popular Tourist tiers. The 6-month single-entry e-Tourist Visa (e-T2V) suits travellers planning one long uninterrupted stay between three and six months — a single trip rather than several visits. The Business e-Visa covers trade-fair attendance, conference participation, sales calls and short consulting work; it requires an Indian-side invitation letter and does not double as a Tourist visa for paid work. The Medical e-Visa and its associated Medical Attendant e-Visa cover treatment trips to Indian hospitals; admission letter required, with a slot for the accompanying family member.

A short pre-trip checklist prevents avoidable rejections and surprises. Passport validity: a minimum of six months from the date of application, with at least two blank pages for immigration stamps. Renew at home if you are inside that window — the consular passport-renewal route from inside India is slow.

The passport-style photo must be a JPG file between 10 KB and 1 MB, equal height and width, full face front view, eyes open, no spectacles, plain light or white background with no shadows. The portal rejects oversize files and shadowed backgrounds without telling you which one is the problem, so check the dimensions and the lighting before you upload.

The address-in-India field appears on every application. For tourism, the name and phone number of your first hotel and its city are enough — you do not need to list every onward leg. For a yoga school, ashram or language course, use the institution's official registered address.

Sensitive nationalities and origins. Travellers naturalised from a sensitive-relation country — Pakistan above all — or with parents or grandparents who held that citizenship, face extra paperwork and a longer processing window. The bilateral framework refreshes every year. If this applies to your passport, our per-market editions list the current paperwork; if not, the standard track applies.

Children and minors each need their own e-Visa application tied to their own passport — the parent's e-Visa does not cover the child. Include the international long-form birth certificate naming both parents in the upload bundle, plus a parental-consent document if the child travels with one parent or a guardian.

Yellow Fever certificate. Travellers arriving within six days of departure from a Yellow Fever-endemic country must present a valid International Certificate of Vaccination at Indian immigration. India treats 29 listed African countries and 13 listed Central or South American countries as endemic. The certificate becomes valid ten days after the vaccine and is recognised internationally for life. Without one, you face quarantine of up to six days at a designated facility — a real risk on itineraries that begin or transit through the listed countries.

OCI eligibility covers former Indian citizens and the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Indian citizens. The card grants visa-free lifetime entry to India, the right to live and work in the country, broadly the same standing as Indian citizens in everyday matters (residence, banking, education) and the right to own non-agricultural property. It does not grant the right to vote, to hold public office or to own agricultural land.

The 2026 re-linking rule is friendlier than the framework it replaced. The OCI card needs re-issuance once — when a new passport is issued after the cardholder reaches age 20. For any later passport renewal between ages 21 and 50, the card does not need re-issuance: the cardholder updates the new passport details on the designated government portal within three months, free of charge. Above 50 the same portal-update rule applies; the old re-issue-at-50 step has been retired.

From 1 May 2026 the e-OCI digital system rolled out under the Citizenship Amendment Rules, 2026 is the default channel for the application and for the passport-update process. The system is fully online and paperless. Carry the OCI card and the linked foreign passport at immigration. If the linked passport has been replaced and the portal update has not been completed, complete it before flying.

Air India has finished the Vistara merger. It now runs as the single Indian flag carrier on one integrated long-haul schedule out of Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kochi, with the legacy Vistara codes retired from new bookings. IndiGo's widebody fleet now serves more European and Gulf cities directly than at any earlier point, opening up budget-tier direct flights on a growing list of routes. Together they have cut a connection out of the typical Europe-to-India and US-to-India journey on a meaningful share of routes.

The traditional one-stop options remain plentiful. Major European carriers run direct service to Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru from their primary hubs. Emirates via Dubai, Qatar Airways via Doha, Etihad via Abu Dhabi and Turkish Airlines via Istanbul provide one-stop coverage from almost anywhere. Total flight time from northern Europe to Delhi or Mumbai is eight to nine hours direct, or twelve to sixteen with one stop. From the US East Coast, direct flights take around fourteen hours; one-stop journeys add another four to eight. Per-market direct-flight gateways from your home airports sit in our per-market editions.

Most first-time visitors never encounter a restricted-area permit. The Golden Triangle, the Kerala-Tamil Nadu classical loop, Goa, Mumbai and Maharashtra, Varanasi and the Gangetic plain, Karnataka, and most of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana all sit inside the general e-Visa zone with no extra paperwork. The permit regimes apply at the country's sensitive borders.

Protected Area Permits (PAP) cover foreign-national entry to Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, parts of Sikkim and parts of Ladakh near the China-Tibet border. The Arunachal PAP runs through licensed tour operators with a fixed itinerary; it is not a walk-in application. Nagaland's PAP is easier outside the December Hornbill Festival peak. Restricted Area Permits (RAP) cover parts of the Andaman & Nicobar Islands and a smaller subset of Sikkim and northeastern frontier zones; since 2018, thirty inhabited Andaman islands no longer require an RAP for foreign visitors. From 2026, Sikkim's RAP for foreign nationals is issued through the e-FRRO portal online — no physical permits at the border any more. The Inner Line Permit (ILP) is the parallel regime for Indian citizens in the same regions; foreign nationals follow PAP or RAP instead.

Foreigners who stay in India for more than 180 continuous days in a single visit must register with the Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO) within 14 days of crossing day 180. The rule applies to long-stay tourists on the 1-year or 5-year multi-entry tier just as it does to student and employment visa holders. Most short-trip travellers never trigger it: the 30-day tier rules it out by definition, and most multi-entry tourist trips stay well under six months in any single visit. The threshold is continuous stay, not aggregate days in the year — leaving and returning resets the clock.

What catches people is exactly that continuous-stay reading. If you arrive on a multi-entry e-Visa, stay 100 days, leave for a fortnight to Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan or the Maldives and return for another 90 days, the counter resets and FRRO does not trigger. If you stay inside India and only travel between states the day count keeps running. Yoga-school students, long-stay digital nomads in Goa or Mysuru and Vipassana retreatants from Europe or North America hit the rule regularly without expecting to. The process itself is now fully online through the e-FRRO portal — paperless, cashless and ordinarily without an office visit; the office only calls you in if something on the application needs sorting out. OCI cardholders and children below twelve are exempt. Treat day 175 as the latest comfortable moment to open the application.

Thirty-three Indian airports operate e-Visa counters, including Delhi (DEL), Mumbai (BOM), Bengaluru (BLR), Chennai (MAA), Hyderabad (HYD), Kochi (COK), Kolkata (CCU) and the major regional hubs, alongside nineteen seaports and four land border crossings (Raxaul, Rupaidiha, Darranga and Jogbani). After disembarking, head to the immigration counter labelled e-Visa, present the printed PDF approval letter or its digital version on your phone alongside the passport, and submit fingerprints and a digital photograph. Stamping takes five to fifteen minutes depending on the queue. Carry the PDF printed and separately from your hand luggage — a phone battery flat at the wrong moment is a small but real risk.

Travel insurance is not legally required for entry, but private hospitals at the major destinations charge international rates, and a serious illness or accident can mean repatriation costs that local hospital cash payments do not cover. Confirm that your home-country policy is valid for the duration of the trip and for what you will be doing (motorbikes, trekking, diving). The Yellow Fever certificate is the only mandatory health document at the border, and only on the conditions described above. Routine recommended vaccinations — Hepatitis A and B, typhoid, tetanus boosters, regional Japanese encephalitis for rural northeastern trips — are travel-medicine standard rather than Indian-government rules; speak to a travel-medicine practitioner six to eight weeks ahead.