How to Apply for an India eVisa from London, Step by Step

If you have just booked a flight to Delhi from Heathrow and are sitting at your kitchen table in Battersea or Bromley wondering where to begin, this article walks you through the India eVisa application exactly as a British applicant will encounter it. We have tested the form on a UK keyboard, a UK card and a UK home Wi-Fi connection, so the advice that follows reflects the real friction points rather than abstract policy.

Before you open the form: gather these five things

Sitting down without your documents leads to half-finished forms that time out. Have ready, in one folder on your desktop:

• A scan or sharp phone photograph of your British passport bio-data page.
• A square, plain-white-background passport-style photo (JPEG, between 10 KB and 1 MB).
• Your full UK home address as it appears on a council tax or utility bill.
• The full name, address and telephone number of your first hotel in India.
• A UK debit or credit card with international payments enabled.

Step 1 - Choose category and validity

You will be asked to pick the type of visa (Tourist, Business, Medical, Conference) and the validity. For most British holidaymakers, the one-year multiple-entry Tourist eVisa is the sweet spot: it costs only a little more than the 30-day version, gives you flexibility to add a second trip in the same year, and avoids re-applying if your dates slip. See the current India eVisa fees for a comparison.

Step 2 - The biographical page

This is the section that, in our reviews of UK rejections, accounts for around 40% of all manual queries. The fields look simple but each has a quiet rule:

• Surname / Given Name: match the passport machine-readable zone exactly. If your passport shows "SMITH" and "JOHN PAUL", do not type "John-Paul" or "John P".
• Place of birth: use the town printed in your passport, not the hospital. "Watford" not "Watford General".
• Previous nationality: only relevant if you became British by naturalisation; otherwise leave blank.
• Religion: a mandatory Indian field - choose the nearest option or "Others" with a clarifier.

Step 3 - Parents and grandparents

British applicants are often surprised by the depth of family questions. India asks for both parents' names, dates of birth, places of birth and nationalities. If your parents were born in Pakistan or Bangladesh, you must say so - undeclared heritage is the number-one cause of long manual reviews. Honest declaration almost always still results in approval; concealment frequently does not.

Step 4 - Address fields, the UK formatting trap

The form uses an Indian address format. UK applicants should:

• Type the house number and street name on the first address line, exactly as Royal Mail formats it.
• Put the town in "City" and the post town's county in "State" (e.g. "Surrey" or "Greater Manchester").
• Use your full UK postcode in the "Postal Code" field - including the space, which most Indian systems accept.
• Choose "United Kingdom" as the country.

"The single most common reason for an additional document request on UK applications is a UK postcode squeezed into the wrong field. Spend the extra few seconds on the address - it pays back later."

Step 5 - Uploading the photograph

Take a fresh photo against a plain wall - pure white if possible, magnolia at a push, but never patterned. Daylight from a window in front of you, not behind. Crop it square. Avoid uniforms and avoid glasses (the latter is now a hard rule). British applicants using a glossy old photo scanned from a strip rarely sail through; a phone snap taken five minutes ago almost always does.

Step 6 - Passport bio-data scan

Lay the open passport flat in good light, take a top-down photo (no flash) and make sure all four corners are visible. The machine-readable zone at the bottom should be sharp enough to read every character. PDF or JPEG both work.

Step 7 - Payment in GBP

UK cards are fully supported. Payment is taken in your card's currency, with the GBP equivalent shown at checkout based on the live rate. Some UK banks, particularly Monzo, Starling and Revolut, occasionally flag the transaction as suspicious because the merchant routes through India - keep your phone in reach to approve the push notification, or you may need to retry. Card payments occasionally fail at the bank's end; switching to a second card almost always resolves it.

Step 8 - After submission

You will immediately receive an Application ID by email. Save this. The ETA (Electronic Travel Authorisation) itself usually arrives within 24 to 72 hours from a noreply address. Check your spam folder - UK applicants on BT, Sky and Virgin Media email accounts frequently report the eVisa landing in junk.

If your application is put under "Pending"

About 7% of UK submissions go to manual review. This usually clears within 48 hours and does not require any further action on your part. If you are asked for an additional document, the request will come from the official portal - never share your passport via WhatsApp or unverified email, no matter how official the message looks.

The day before you fly

Two quick housekeeping items: confirm the ETA shows "Granted" on the status check page, and submit your India e-Arrival Card within 72 hours of your departure. With those two PDFs printed and your passport in hand, you are ready to clear UK exit and board for Delhi.

The India eVisa application, despite its bureaucratic aesthetics, is genuinely manageable for a UK applicant who reads carefully. Most British travellers complete the whole thing in under half an hour over a cup of tea. The trick is preparation, not speed.

Related guides