India eVisa Guide for Australians | What to Know Before You Apply

Start here: which document do you actually need?

Before anything else, work out which of these three people you are, because they need completely different paperwork and the wrong answer wastes weeks.

You are an Australian citizen with no Indian heritage, going for a holiday or to visit friends. You need an electronic visa, applied for online, approved before you fly. This guide is mostly for you.

You were born in India, or your parents or grandparents were. Stop and ask about an OCI card before you apply for anything else. It is a lifelong entry facility rather than a visa, and if you are eligible it removes this entire chore from the rest of your life. Plenty of Indian-Australian families apply for tourist visas year after year without realising they qualify for something better.

You are travelling for business, study, medical treatment or a conference. Different category, different requirements, and a tourist visa is not a shortcut. Apply for what you are actually doing.

Getting this first decision right is worth more than every other paragraph on this page. Tell us who is travelling when you ask for a quote and we will flag which conversation you should be having.

What the eVisa is, and what it is not

The Indian electronic visa is applied for online, approved by email, and checked by your airline before you board in Australia. That last part matters more than people realise: the airline will not let you fly without it. There is no negotiating at the gate, no sorting it out on arrival, no exception for a compelling family reason. You either have it or you are watching the aircraft leave.

It is not a visa on arrival. Australians travelling to Bali or Thailand are used to a system where the paperwork happens at the other end. India does not work that way, and the assumption that it might is the most expensive misunderstanding on this page.

The timing rule

Apply as soon as your flights are held. Not the week before. Not "once things settle down".

Processing is often quick, and that is exactly what lulls people. It is often quick, not always quick. Applications get queried. Photos get rejected. Names get flagged. A system has an outage. Any one of those turns a two-day process into a two-week one, and if you left yourself four days, you no longer have a trip.

Our advice on the sequencing: book the flights first, apply immediately after. Fares on this route reward earliness so heavily, as our best time to book guide explains, that waiting on paperwork before securing a December fare is a genuinely expensive form of caution. Hold the flights, apply the same week, and give yourself a month of margin you will probably not need.

Why applications get rejected

Almost never for interesting reasons. Almost always for these:

• The photo. There is a specification, it is precise, and a phone snapshot against a patterned wall will not do. Get this right first time and you have removed the most common failure.
• The name. It must match the passport exactly. Not the version you use socially, not the shortened one, not the one with the middle name dropped. Exactly.
• Passport validity. India generally wants at least six months beyond your date of entry, plus blank pages. Check the expiry date before you apply, not after.
• Contradictions. An answer on the form that does not square with another answer, or with the passport. The system notices.
• The wrong category. Applying as a tourist for a trip that is not tourism.

None of these are hard to avoid. All of them are easy to do at eleven at night while distracted, which is when most applications are filled in.

The entry-point trap that interacts with your flights

Here is the one that connects paperwork to booking, and the reason it is on a travel agent's website rather than a legal one.

Electronic visas are valid for entry at a defined list of airports and seaports, not at every point of entry in the country. The major cities are covered. Smaller and more unusual entry points may not be. Most travellers never encounter this, because most travellers fly into Delhi or Mumbai.

But if your itinerary is unusual, if you are entering overland, arriving by sea, or landing somewhere off the beaten track, the visa category and the entry point have to agree with each other. That is a question to settle before you buy the fare, not after.

This is precisely why we flag the visa requirement with every India quote we send. Not because we can apply for it, but because your itinerary and your paperwork have to be the same shape, and we are the ones looking at the itinerary.

The OCI conversation, properly

If there is any Indian heritage in your family, read this twice.

An OCI card is available to people of Indian origin and, in defined circumstances, their spouses. It is not a visa; it is a lifelong facility that lets you enter India without applying for anything each time. For an Indian-Australian family that visits every couple of years, the difference over a lifetime is substantial: no applications, no photo specifications, no anxious fortnight before every trip.

Two things worth knowing. First, it takes considerably longer than an eVisa, so it is a project to start between trips rather than before one. Second, an OCI has its own rules, including how it interacts with the passport it was issued against, which catches people out when they renew a passport. If you hold one, check that detail before you fly rather than at the airport.

We raise this with clients constantly, and a surprising number of families have been paying for tourist visas for a decade without ever being told they qualified for something better.

What we do, and what we do not

We are flight consultants. We are not migration agents and we will not pretend to be, because paperwork advice from the wrong professional is how people get hurt.

What we do: flag the requirement with every India quote, tell you what your specific itinerary needs from your paperwork, raise the OCI question when your name or your family history suggests it should be raised, and check that your passport validity clears the requirement before you pay for a fare. And we tell you to apply now rather than later, every time, because the week-before application is the one that goes wrong.

What we will not do: tell you the current fee, the current processing time or the current validity terms on a web page, because those change and a stale number is worse than no number. Check the official Indian government portal for the live position, and be careful with search results, because the internet is full of intermediary sites that look official and are not.

If you are planning an India trip and the paperwork feels like the confusing part, start with the flights and we will flag the rest. A consultant will come back within 2 business hours with the fare, the allowance in writing, and a note about exactly which document your particular trip needs. Or call 1800 865 126 and tell us the situation; we have almost certainly seen your version of it before.