The Indian e-visa is not for everyone!

In preparation for my upcoming trip to India at the end of the year, I needed to apply for an Indian tourist e-visa. As a United States citizen who is not of Pakistani descent, I’m in theory eligible to apply for it. And in fact, prevailing online opinions show that the rate of denial is so low that getting approved for one should not even be part of the question.

While most people received their e-visas within hours of applying, my situation was not so simple.

Within hours of applying for my e-visa, I was not approved. Instead, I received an email from indian-evisa@gov.in email address requesting the following information:

1. Please furnish the details of your present & previous occupation/profession and your designation in the company along with the phone number, email ID & address of the employer.

2. Please clarify the exact purpose of your visit to India and the places you intend to visit during your stay in India. Also, furnish the details of the person accompanying you. 

3. Please furnish the details of your complete itinerary for travel in India.

4. Please furnish the details of your Indian verifier/sponsor including his/her address & correct phone number.

Please send the details within the next 24 hours so that we can process your e-Visa application. Kindly revert back to this e-mail only.

This was unexpected, to say the least. I do not have a criminal record (in fact, I’m a NEXUS member and have Global Entry privileges), nor am I of Pakistani descent. So what happened? And how did this work out for me?

Information I provided in response

Before I figured out what exactly happened, I needed to figure out how I’d reply to this email. I spent several hours that evening preparing my email response.

For my present occupation, I stated I am a software engineer and attached an employment verification letter from The Work Number to the email. For the phone number, I gave The Work Number’s verification number. For the email ID, I just gave my company email address (but I never got any emails to it).

As for my past occupation, I stated that I was a student at the University of Texas at Austin.

Lesson learned: Do not put N/A for past occupation. You should always at least put “student” and the school you most recently attended.

The exact purpose of my visit to India was for sightseeing, so I responded with that. I intended to visit Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Udaipur, and Mumbai, so I listed those cities down. Nobody was going to accompany me, so I stated that plainly as a matter of fact, despite that being less desirable than me being accompanied by an Indian national.

As for furnishing the complete itinerary, I provided all of my flight numbers for the airfare that I had either already booked or would be booking soon. I also provided the cities I would be staying at each day, as well as the hotels in those cities (and their addresses).

Last but certainly not least: I needed an Indian “verifier/sponsor”, plus their address and phone number. Most people just fill out their hotel for this. In my case, it didn’t seem to be enough. I had to actually find someone in India who was willing to vouch for me. Well yikes! All of my Indian friends are U.S. citizens. They have Indian relatives, but asking for them to verify me was a big ask. Thankfully I finally found one within the 24-hour deadline. It was stressful but I made it happen. (Special thanks and huge shoutout to my verifier!)

The result of my e-visa application

I thought I was going to be denied this e-visa, for reasons I’ll explain in the next section. However, to my pleasant surprise, I was granted the e-visa four days later! (And on a Saturday, no less!)

However, had I known that I was at risk of increased scrutiny, I probably wouldn’t have even thought about going to India.

Who gets increased scrutiny?

After I got this email, I started doing more research online of who gets rejected for these tourist e-visas. (I don’t count individuals who try to use a tourist e-visa for clearly non-tourist activities.) Apart from the special bias against Pakistani citizens and people with Pakistani heritage, I found three major categories:

• Those who have Afghan, Chinese, Iraqi, and Sudanese parents or were once Afghan/Chinese/Iraqi/Sudanese citizens.
  • India either has poor relations with these countries, or they believe these countries may send over terrorists to India, or both.
  • Make no mistake: Afghan, Chinese, Iraqi, and Sudanese citizens cannot apply for e-visas, period.
  • In fact, the aforementioned nationalities explicitly receive more scrutiny and must first be cleared by India’s Ministry of Home Affairs (their equivalent of the Department of Homeland Security) before they are even able to be considered for a regular paper visa, even if they are just applying for a tourist visa.
    • These nationalities don’t just face increased scrutiny for tourist visas. They also face it for conference visas, among other visas.
    • These nationalities also can’t enter India twice within a two-month period. “With effect from January 24, 2013, the gap of two months required between visits to India of a foreign national on a Tourist Visa would be applicable only in the case of nationals of Afghanistan, China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, Sudan, foreigners of Pakistan origin and Stateless persons.”
  • However, for people of other nationalities who have parents of those nationalities, or who were born into those nationalities but have since naturalized to another citizenship, they can still apply for e-visas. It’s just that that they won’t have an easy time doing so.
• Those who have visited Afghanistan, China, Iraq, Pakistan, or Sudan in the past ten (10) years.
  • This is just my guess, but I assume they are likely worried about people who have gone to these countries and left with an agenda to commit terrorism in India.
• Journalists, even if visiting India, can’t simply apply for a tourist e-visa. Instead, they must always apply for a journalist visa.
  • Since there are a lot of journalists who abuse tourist visas to report on things within India, it looks like they crack down hard if you list your occupation as “journalist” and apply for a tourist e-visa instead. India wishes to control the foreign tourists that it admits.

Anyone in these categories should be very careful when applying for an e-visa and may want to reconsider applying altogether. Their e-visa application will be scrutinized. They should be prepared to find an Indian verifier/sponsor, just like in my situation.

Closing thoughts

At the end of the day, I am someone who has more of a connection to India than the average tourist not of South Asian descent. I speak some Hindi (which I learned during my undergraduate studies) and I have learned a lot about Indian culture throughout the years. Any of my Indian friends would certainly agree that I should visit India at least once due to my affinity for the culture. I’m glad that my e-visa application’s results transcended political concerns, which was the right choice because those concerns are truly not applicable to my personal situation at all.