In what could be a fillip for India as a tourism destination, the country has finally bitten the bullet of electronic arrival cards from October 1.
Starting Wednesday, Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport will offer foreign passport holders the option of filling out their arrival information online in advance. The facility, offered in conjunction with the Bureau of Immigration, is expected to be extended to other international entry points in the country pretty soon.
However, in typical fashion, the announcement was only made just hours before the launch of the facility—when usually e-arrival cards need to be filled out at least 3 days in advance.
This means that though the facility is available from midnight on October 1, it might take a few days before travellers get to know about it and start using it.
“This initiative reflects the Government of India’s commitment to delivering a world-class hassle-free travel experience while promoting sustainable practices,” said Videh Kumar Jaipuriar, CEO of Delhi International Airports Limited (DIAL, the parent company that runs Delhi Airport), adding, “By digitising the arrival card process, we are enabling faster clearances, shorter waiting times and greater convenience to enhance the overall passenger experience.”
For India, the e-arrival system, once it takes off and gets streamlined, would form an important link in the nation’s ‘one-step-forward-two-steps-back’ situation when it comes to attracting international tourists.
In recent years, the Modi government wooed tourists from many economically advanced countries like Japan by offering e-visa, visa-on-arrival, etc, hoping that the simplified procedure (as compared to submitting documents and passports and waiting in long queues outside Indian embassies, as in many cases) would help shore up the nation’s flagging inbound numbers since Covid.
But not only did it not help, the bureaucratic processes involved probably made matters even worse—many tourists coming into Indian airports groggy after a long sapping flight and at odd hours were still made to go through the process of filling up the long disembarkation forms (ironically, even Indian passport holders had to do the same till a few years ago) and then queue up in front of surly immigration counters.
The e-card will help in sorting out the cumbersomeness to some extent. But of course, the bigger picture is that India cannot afford any more of this lack of enthusiasm or ‘ease of tourism’, considering the precarious geostrategic scenario and how the notional loss of trade if no deal is reached with the US could hit India’s foreign exchange situation.
Indian foreign arrivals are still less than a crore, and still to cross the pre-pandemic highs, even as nearby hot spots like Thailand saw 3.5 crore last year. In fact, what has been propping up the country’s travel and tourism industry has been two other factors: one, the boom in domestic travel in general, and spiritual/religious travel in particular, and two, the hordes of the Indian diaspora visiting their motherland.
The electronic arrival card is a relatively new phenomenon, being introduced in recent years in Cambodia (2024), Korea (February 24, 2025), Thailand and Nigeria (May 1, 2025) and from tomorrow onwards in all of Indonesia (was implemented in Jakarta and Bali airports from September 1 onward), as well as Delhi in India.