Indian Visa

[Marigoldandivy]

Has anyone applied for a tourist visa for India recently? I have booked a holiday for next year but have heard dire warnings that the application process is tortuous. Also, the company that would normally process the application for you no longer does so for India, so I am worried that I could face problems.
Thanks for any feedback.

Hi, yes I did! Slightly more complicated for me in that I hold a UK passport but live in Europe. At present UK passport holders cannot apply for an E visa. I’m sure that will change. The form itself was easy! Rather repetitive but took around 30 mins. The site itself is rather unstable and I had a couple of attempts as it froze! The advice I can give you is to ensure you have time and aren’t rushed on starting the application for,. I actually had an appointment in Lisbon and it was a cinch. My passport was ready in three days!

I can’t help you with the London offices for appointments though. Hopefully by the time you need to apply, E visas will be available for UK passport holders.
sorry, not much help but Good Luck! I’m going to India next week for the first time.

I did about four years ago - it's long winded but do-able!

But a big word of warning, make sure you go to the official Indian Government website, as a commercial one that charges more looks almost identical - my friend was nearly caught out.

I accessed the correct site by going on the Indian High Commision London website, and followed their link to the visa section from there.

India is fabulous!

Hi OP, there have been a couple of threads about this issue recently, which had links to information regarding the current problems, so taking a look at those may help. Apologies if you've already read them.

Currently midway through the process.

The form is tortuous but just read all the guidance and you'll get through it, hopefully with everything filled in correctly.

You need 2 passport photos. We got ours from Timpsons who had the exact dimensions needed on their system, they emailed us the pics and we got print outs.

Getting an appointment is a pain but doable. They're currently released about 6 weeks in advance, one day at a time. This is at 7.30pm every evening. You need to be online at that time and just persist with refreshing the screen every time it says the site has exceeded the maximum number of users. It took me 2 days to get an appointment for 6 weeks hence after lots of refreshing and swearing.

Since the evisa has been stopped, all tourist visas seem to be 12 month multi-entry ones. Which is annoying and more expensive but it hopefully gives you a bigger window if you want to start trying to get an appointment now.

I have connections in the Foreign Office and none of them have any confidence about the evisa situation changing any time soon, so I would err on the side of caution and start the process in plenty of time.

We can’t get online visas as during covid we blocked Indians coming and they retaliated. I hope with the apparently imminent Indian trade deal and an Indian origin PM they may finally reverse that. I got one in the summer, ballades up my first attempt as there are about 5 verstions of British citizen and I got it wrong, but I live quite close to VFS so it could have been worse. Just plan months early.