The India e-Visa is an electronic visa applied for online before travel via the official Government of India portal. It is the route most foreign tourists use to enter the country.

There are several e-Visa categories — tourist, business, medical, conference — and within tourist there are typically several validity bands (commonly 30-day, one-year, and five-year). What you are eligible for, and what each band allows in terms of stay length and number of entries, depends on your nationality and the current rules. Those rules change. The official portal — indianvisaonline.gov.in — is the only authoritative source.

Citizens of most major travel-market countries are eligible for the India e-Visa, including most of the EU, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the GCC, Japan, Singapore, and many others. A small list of nationalities is ineligible and must apply for a paper visa at an Indian mission. Visa-on-arrival exists but is restricted to very few passport types.

This article is not an eligibility ruling. Confirm your eligibility on the official portal before booking flights.

Apply at least a week before travel, longer if possible. The portal asks for passport details, recent travel history, your Indian address (typically your first night's hotel), and a digital passport photo and biographic-page scan to its current spec.

Print the e-Visa approval and carry it with you. On arrival at the immigration desk, present passport and the printed e-Visa. Approval emails are not a substitute. Biometric capture happens at the desk.

An e-Visa is generally for tourism, certain types of business meetings, short medical visits, or specified conferences. It is not work authorisation. Stay limits per visit, and total stay-in-year limits, vary by visa band and nationality — read your specific approval, do not assume.

Protected and restricted area permits (PAP/RAP) — for North Sikkim, the Andamans, parts of Arunachal Pradesh, Nubra/Pangong in Ladakh, and others — are separate and additional. We arrange them where applicable.

The most frequent mistakes we see: applying through a third-party agent site rather than the official portal (paying more, sometimes getting incorrect filings); leaving the application too late and trying to push it through; uploading a photo that fails the portal's spec and getting a delay; assuming a passport with less than six months' validity will be accepted (it usually will not).

If anything is unclear, ask the concierge during planning. We do not file your visa for you — that step is yours — but we will tell you straightforwardly what the current process looks like for your passport.