India's Digital e-Arrival Card becomes mandatory in April 2026
From April 2026, every passenger flying to India — including NRIs and OCI cardholders — must complete a Digital e-Arrival Card before boarding. The physical disembarkation card has been discontinued.
From April 2026, every passenger flying into India — including NRIs, OCI cardholders, and foreign nationals — must complete a Digital e-Arrival Card before boarding their flight, TravelTourister reports. The familiar physical disembarkation card, handed out by cabin crew mid-flight for the past several decades, has been permanently discontinued.
The change consolidates the immigration formalities into a single digital form that can be submitted before the flight. In principle, it should speed up arrival at Indian airports — particularly at peak hours in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, where queues at the disembarkation desk have been a perennial bottleneck.
In practice, for diaspora travellers, the change means a small but consequential pre-flight workflow update: the e-Arrival Card must be completed before you board, not after you land. Travellers without an e-Arrival Card may be denied boarding by the airline, in line with the airline's standard documentation checks.
The card is part of a wider digital push under the 2026 OCI and immigration reforms — including the fully digital e-OCI system that launched in May. Together, the changes redraw the operational geography of how the diaspora travels to, and into, India.
Source: TravelTourister.
