The Agonies of an Indian Visa

Or, the deadweight loss of paperwork

I recently applied for a visa to visit India. It was one of the most hilariously painful experiences of my life.

Irish citizenship is generally one of the most favourable in the world. Irish people can get an e-Visa to travel to India (as in, they don’t need to attend in-person meetings at the embassy or consulate). When I applied the first time, this wasn’t the case for my British friends. As far as I could tell, this was because of a petty diplomatic dispute in which India was punishing Britain for restricting Indians coming to the UK after the outbreak of the Delta COVID variant (‘the Indian variant’). In principle, all I needed to do was fill out an online form and pay a small processing fee to the State Bank of India. Would that it were so simple!   

The first hurdle you confront is that the form requires you to say where you will be entering and leaving the country and when. This is fine – except that if you can’t get a visa, they won’t let you in the country anyway, so there’s a chicken and egg problem. I guess they have in mind that you should plan out your travel, then secure a visa, and then hope the same flights are available a few days later.

The second hurdle is that you need to list every country you’ve set foot in within the last ten years, with an ominous note telling you that, if this information is inaccurate in any way, you can be deported. 

The third hurdle is a drop-down menu to select your religion, in which ‘Zorastrian’ (~115,000 members total) is an option, but ‘Atheist’ (~10% of the world) is not. 

At the fourth hurdle, you must select either your spouse's or your father’s profession (never your mother’s) from a bizarrely specific list that does not include ‘retired’, ‘unemployed’, or ‘self-employed’. No bother – I viewed these as more funny quirks than serious issues. 

The fifth hurdle is a declaration in which you must answer YES or NO to questions about whether you have committed various horrible crimes, including terrorism, sex trafficking, and financial fraud. This will be familiar to anyone who has travelled to the United States – and it exists to speed up deportations against actual terrorists, rather than to find incredibly stupid ones willing to confess. But the bizarre feature of the Indian system is that the default answer to all of the questions is yes. If you fill out your application in a hurry by just clicking ‘continue’, among the crimes you will have confessed to include: 

• Glorifying terrorist violence

• Genocide

• Political killings

• Child abuse

• Economic offense (?)

• Crime against women

The sixth hurdle is that, while you are doing this, the page will crash at the drop of a hat. It will also time out after more than a few minutes for ‘security’ reasons, requiring you to restart filling out the page.

Among the reasons I was required to fill out sections of the form again include:

• My mother’s name includes an unrecognised character (‘á’)

• In trying to squeeze a long address into the two available lines, I used a comma, also unrecognised

• At various points, I merely selected ‘other’ from the drop-down menu without also writing NA in the corresponding text box

The photo section is your seventh hurdle, in which you must upload a scan of your passport and a photo of your head against a clear background. But that photo can’t be the same one as was used in your passport – fine. The photo must be a JPEG, and not a more modern format (it required some fiddling around in my phone’s settings to figure out how to take photos as JPEGs). Finally, the photo and the scan need to be between very specific minimum and maximum file sizes. Not a problem in principle, but even a cropped photo from a phone is far too high resolution – so I needed to go to a compression website to make the picture a smaller file. The size restraint was such that I needed to try two sites before my photo was compressed enough to be uploaded. I joked with my friend that, by the end, my face looked like it was in Minecraft. 

And then you’re finished! All you need to do is pay a $40 USD processing fee and your e-Visa will arrive within three days. 

…haha no, it’s not that easy.

You see, it all depends on why you want to visit India. There are separate categories of visas for business, conference, tourism, and medical reasons. And within that, there are more specific sub-categories. Last year, I was invited to an event in Rajasthan that straddled the boundary between conference, tourism, and business. But the Indian embassy in Dublin put its foot down that, nuance be damned, this was a conference. They didn’t come quite out and say this, though, so I had to infer it from being denied a tourist visa on slightly different grounds three times in a row.

The conference visa application form required letters of permission from the Indian Ministry of External Affairs and the Indian Ministry of Internal Affairs (!). Going through all of this bother was obviously ridiculous, so the conference visa was out. I tried again, this time for a business visa to visit under slightly different pretences. That came through, but I failed to communicate the appropriate urgency to the appropriate mandarins, and so missed my flights (this saga had been going on for weeks at this point). 

The event organisers took pity on me and invited me back this year. Even if the business visa had lasted long enough, it expired when my passport expired, so I needed to go through the whole rigamarole again (it worked eventually).

All in all, securing a visa to travel to India as a tourist once took:

• ~$350 in processing fees

• Five separate completed visa applications

• Lord knows how many instances of filling out the form

• ~20 hours of cumulative work

• Numerous phone calls and emails with the embassy (yes, much of this could have been cleared up in person, but I was away at the time)

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There are a few questions one might have about this process:

1. How is it even possible that government forms are this poorly designed, in a country famous for a tech elite that speaks remarkably good English? There are enough grammatical errors that I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that not a single person with properly fluent English looked over this form, used by all nationalities eligible for e-Visas.  

2. Why do many countries appear to try their darndest to dissuade tourism and investment, with highly bureaucratic processes like this? 

3. Clearly, most people within the system do not actually care whether the rules are followed closely. The border guards will not care whether you forgot some of the countries you’ve been on holiday to as a child. Given this, who designed all these rules? Who is propagating them? 

Now, I really don’t mean to pick on India. Visiting America can be nearly as bad. But what’s distressing is that this is what success looks like. This is what the system is like for a privileged Westerner with great citizenship and a lot of time on his hands. Imagine the same hurdles being faced by a person with significantly less money, English proficiency, and time than me. Then you will get some intuition for how much our current system dissuades migration (both permanent and temporary, like tourism). Even where migration isn’t formally capped, bureaucracy dissuades precisely those people that stand to benefit from immigration the most!

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Bryan Caplan has claimed that borders are 98% closed – in the sense that, of all instances of a person wanting to go to a country, 98% of them are of at least questionable legality. I’m not sure whether he meant this literally, as this seems like an exaggeration to me. But the true number is certainly high. 

When I tell these horror stories to my parents, they don’t quite believe me, or don’t quite believe the experiences I’m talking about are statistically representative. And yes, if you live in Ireland and your holidays are in Sicily or Tenerife, you are one of the rare humans for whom migration bureaucracy is irrelevant. Thank your lucky stars.

In conclusion, the next time someone asks me why illegal immigrants can’t just fill out the proper forms and enter their destination country legally, I am going to hit them over the head with a tennis racket.