Indian Visa from Germany — How and Where to Apply
Most people who land on this page do not actually need an Indian visa. Start here, because applying for the wrong thing wastes weeks.
1. You hold an Indian passport
You do not need a visa for India. Your passport is your right of entry. What you may need instead is a passport renewal, or a passport for your child.
2. You hold a German (or other foreign) passport and were born Indian
You need either an OCI card (lifelong entry, no visa needed again) or a one-off e-Visa. If you travel to India more than once every few years, OCI is worth the effort — it never expires and removes the visa question permanently.
3. You hold a German or EU passport with no Indian background
You need an e-Visa. Everything below applies to you.
4. Your family in India wants to visit you in Germany
That is the opposite direction and a completely different application — a Schengen visitor visa applied for in India, usually needing a Verpflichtungserklärung from you at your local Ausländerbehörde. Nothing on this page applies to it.
Apply only on the government website
The official portal is indianvisaonline.gov.in. Nothing else is official.
Search results are full of lookalike sites with names like "india-evisa" and "apply-evisa-india". They are private agents. They take the same government fee and add a service fee of anywhere from 15 to 150 dollars on top, for filling in a form you can fill in yourself in twenty minutes.
One clear test: the Government of India states that no emergency or express fee exists for an e-Visa. If a website offers to rush your visa for an extra payment, it is not the government.
How to apply, step by step
- Check your passport first. It must be valid for at least six months on the day you apply, and it needs two blank pages.
- Work out your timing. The fee has to be paid at least four days before you arrive in India. Applying the night before a flight does not work. Start two to three weeks ahead.
- Prepare two files before you open the form — this is where almost everyone gets stuck. See the sizes below.
- Fill in the form on the official portal. Every name and date must match your passport exactly, including middle names and spelling.
- Pay. A bank charge of about 2.5 percent is added on top of the visa fee. Fees differ by nationality, so read the amount on the portal — do not trust a number you found in a blog, including this one.
- Wait for the ETA by email, then print it. Carry the printout with you. Your visa is not in your passport.
The two files, and the exact sizes
The portal rejects files that are even slightly outside these limits, usually with no useful explanation:
- Passport bio page — PDF, between 10 KB and 300 KB
- Photo — JPEG, between 10 KB and 1 MB, face straight on, plain white background, no glasses, head centred
A photo taken on a modern phone is normally 3 to 6 MB — around ten times too big. A scan of your passport page is often over 1 MB. Both have to be brought down without making them unreadable, and that is the point where people give up for the evening.
Free tools that do exactly this:
📉 Make a file fit an exact KB limit
👤 Make a passport photo (correct size)
📄 Turn a photo of a document into a PDF
These run inside your browser on our sister site SepoooTools — your passport photo is never uploaded to any server. Free, no sign-up.
What an e-Visa does not let you do
- It cannot be extended and cannot be converted into another visa type once you are in India.
- You may only enter through designated airports and seaports. Exit can be anywhere. Check your arrival airport before booking an unusual route.
- It is not valid for Protected, Restricted or Cantonment areas — parts of the north-east, Ladakh border areas and the Andaman interior need a separate permit.
- If you plan to stay longer or work, you need a regular visa from an Indian mission, not an e-Visa.
Why applications get rejected
- A name spelled differently from the passport, even by one letter.
- The photo has a shadow, a patterned background, or the head is off-centre.
- The uploaded file is outside the size limits.
- Passport valid for less than six months.
- Applying too close to the travel date.
The fee is not refunded when an application is refused, so it is worth spending ten extra minutes checking before you pay.
Where to go if something goes wrong
Indian missions in Germany are split by the German state you are registered in — Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich and Hamburg each cover different Bundesländer. Applying to the wrong one is a common reason for rejection. Check the jurisdiction list on the embassy website before you contact anyone.
General information, not legal advice. Rules, fees and portals change. Checked against official sources on 14 August 2026. Always confirm on indianvisaonline.gov.in or with the Indian mission responsible for your Bundesland before you pay anything.