India runs one of the world's largest e-Visa programmes: a fully online application covering tourism, business trips, medical treatment and conference attendance, normally approved in about 72 hours. A detail that trips up many travellers (and, until this correction, parts of our own database): the nationality eligibility list is the SAME for every e-Visa sub-type. The official portal publishes a single list of roughly 174 countries and territories — if your passport is on it, you can apply for the e-Tourist, e-Business, e-Medical or e-Conference visa alike. What changes per sub-type is the paperwork and the stay, not who qualifies.
What each e-Visa sub-type actually gives you
- e-Tourist Visa (eTV): 30-day, 1-year or 5-year validity; the 1-year and 5-year versions allow stays up to 90 days per visit for most nationalities (180 days for US, UK, Canadian and Japanese citizens). From USD 25.
- e-Business Visa: 1-year validity, multiple entry, up to 180 days continuous stay — trade fairs, meetings, recruitment, but not employment. USD 80 for most nationalities.
- e-Medical Visa: 60-day triple-entry visa for treatment at a recognised Indian hospital, with up to two companion e-Medical-Attendant visas per patient. USD 80.
- e-Conference Visa: 30-day single entry for a specific event, requiring an organiser invitation plus government event clearance. USD 80.
- Japanese, Singaporean and Sri Lankan nationals pay a reduced USD 25 across the board; a 2.5% bank charge applies to all e-Visa fees.
Who is NOT on the list
A short list of nationalities cannot use ANY India e-Visa and must apply for a regular visa at an Indian embassy or consulate: among the passports we track, that is Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, China, DR Congo, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Syria, Turkey and Yemen. Citizens of Nepal and Bhutan sit at the other extreme — under long-standing friendship treaties they need no visa for India at all, for any purpose.
China: regular visas resumed in July 2025 — the e-Visa did not
India stopped issuing tourist visas to Chinese citizens in 2020 and resumed them in July 2025 as India-China relations normalised — a genuine, well-reported thaw. But the resumption covers REGULAR visas applied for through Indian visa application centres. The e-Visa route remains suspended for Chinese passport holders (and for applicants of any nationality residing in mainland China): the Embassy of India in Beijing states that travel to India on e-Visas stands suspended and previously issued e-Visas are no longer valid. If you hold a Chinese passport, apply for a paper visa — do not pay an "agency" promising an Indian e-Visa.
What we fixed
Our per-passport data for the India e-Business, e-Medical and e-Conference visas had drifted out of sync with the tourist e-Visa's verified list — three sub-types that legally share one eligibility list did not share one in our database. Per sub-type: 27 eligible nationalities (from Albania to Vietnam and Zambia) wrongly showed "visa required", 41 more (including nearly the whole EU bloc, Israel, Kazakhstan and Uruguay) had no rule at all and defaulted to the same wrong answer, and — the error class we treat as most serious — six ineligible nationalities (Algeria, China, DR Congo, Syria, Turkey, Yemen) were wrongly promised an e-Visa they cannot get. All three sub-types are now verified against the official portal's unified list and dated. See the full per-passport breakdown on the India page, check any e-Visa-eligible destination in our e-Visa & ETA guide, and read how we verify every figure in our Editorial & Data Standards.