Change to tourist visa rules re multiple entries - 60-day-out rule scrapped

No country's tourist industry will feel the absence of one individual, but without drops, there is no bucket!

yeah...and m just one of the many thousands of drops just finding out this new rule the hard way...anyway its not the subject of the thread.

Does anybody know if any other countries impose such a restriction?

When my mother died in UK, we were there for some time, returned to India for a mere ten days for important business, then back to UK. If this restriction had been placed on my wife's UK visa we would have been well screwed!

Hey, guys. I am new to the forum. Great info. Does anyone know of anyone leaving Delhi that had the same experience as the folks that left Bangalore?

The departure city would make no difference.

Doesn't Thailand have something similar? I remember after a conference a friend & I traveled to Laos & we had to be out of Thailand for 10 days or something before I could come back on a new visa (the visa on arrival is only 30 days). But it wasn't a huge deal because 10 days is hardly 2 months, though if we'd only wanted to go for 2-3 days it might have been. I was in Thailand for a total of 5 weeks, I think. 3-4 weeks before Laos, and 3 days afterward.

The huge problem is that even if there are letters you can get to justify coming back in, we all know how easy that's going to be! (as in, another huge hassle). And every office/officer will have a different policy for what "urgency" means!! So even with a multiple entry visa you can never quite know if you can enter or not ...

As for 6 months still means you can enter 3 times: not really! Not unless you're in India for less than a day! And even then, your two months won't quite be up before the third entry. So this has basically nullified the short term multiple entry visa. Maximum 2 entries.

The worst part is the complete lack of warning. This is the kind of thing you warn people about a year before hand, not as they are coming through immigration!

Thanks, dzibead,
Actually the departure city may make a difference in implementation. I just heard from someone with 10 yr tourist visa who left Delhi day after Thanksgiving and returned about a week later. No mention on the way out or back in about the 60 day time between visits.

A week later than "the day after Thanksgiving" is today, so is today really the day that individual returned? This is a brand new rule and may not have been in effect yet when the person re-entered India ... or possibly the Delhi personnel were just slightly behind on the new regulations, but don't count on them staying that way. This a clearly intended to be a general rule, not something limited to people entering or leaving particular cities. The notation that now appears on the Travisa website (but which wasn't there two days ago) for processing Indian visa applications in the U.S. makes it plain that this is a general rule.

What isn't entirely clear to me, however, is whether this rule applies only to people who have five-year and ten-year multiple entry visas, but not to people with six-month or one-year multiple entry visas. Both the U.S. website (Travisa) and the Australian website (VFS) refer to this two month gap between entries only in reference to five-year and ten-year visas. They don't say that someone on a six-month or one-year visa would be barred from leaving India for a week or two and then returning. But as wildhorse noted in post #40 above, the info on the website for the Indian Embassy in Germany certainly suggests that the two-month gap requirement applies to all multiple entry tourist visas, not just five- and ten-year ones.

Seriously, the people developing these rules and posting the information on the visa outsourcing websites need to learn to write more clearly and to spell things out -- and they need uniformity of language. They really sound like they're flying by the seat of their pants half the time.

Actually, "today" in India is Saturday. The individual returned two days ago.
The circular from MOI stating this new policy was dated 17 November.

Regardless, you aren't actually thinking that your friend's one-time experience so soon after this new rule came into being means that the rule will be different for people leaving and re-entering through Delhi from what it is for people leaving and re-entering through other cities ... are you? This was probably just an implementation lag, assuming that the new rule was actually "in effect" at the time. The information wasn't even posted on the Travisa site until after December 2.

Does the MOI circular you referred to give the actual "effective date" of the new rule, e.g., "as of "x" date, all long-term visa holders who leave India after a visit of any duration will be required to remain out of India for at least two months before re-entering"? The OP reported that his friend was told she'd be allowed back in right away "this time" but not in the future, which suggests that the rule was promulgated but possibly not being implemented right away. ovenman was allowed back in, too, but was told in the future there would have to be a two-month gap between departure and re-entry. All this simply suggests that the rule isn't actually being implemented yet (but will be shortly), not that it will be implemented differently in different cities.

I just was seeking info about others' experiences in and out of Delhi. We from the west would all assume that the rule will be uniformly applied - however, TII - This Is India.
I have not yet been able to get a copy of the actual circular.

Par for the course. India is just signing up to internationally agreed standards of immigration law implementation!

Doesn't that, also, apply to law makers worldwide?

That is probably only because you have never had to deal with your own immigration authorities .

Yes. And the truncated way info is presented on certain websites and sometimes on official forms makes the problem even worse. Too often clarity is sacrificed to brevity (or pseudo-brevity)and it seems as if whoever is doing the copy writing pays no attention to the reader's point of view - what a reader can or likely will understand from what's been written. The confusion over the notation regarding registration and staying more than 180 days that is printed on the face of the Indian visa form is a perfect example.

Or other kinds of bureaucrats or regulatory authorities, for that matter. Even in the West, uniformity of application is often only a Platonic ideal.

As in... just being good friends?

I could not agree more, the Ministry of Home Affairs website is another example of this; information on the website which is supposedly given to make the situation clearer does nothing of the sort. It is most frustrating try and make sense of phrases which are so sloppily phrased or which miss such essential provisos that they can be interpreted in several ways. Creating clear explanations is a skill which sadly appears to be far from common.