In January 2015 the Indian government realised that processing hundreds of thousands of visa-on-arrival applications manually at the airport was a bad idea (really? you don’t say) and decided to stop this practice and rename it e-Visa.
Now those travelling to India can apply on the internet as late as 4 days before arrival. As always, do not expect this deadline to be adhered to, we would always suggest applying 2 weeks in advance.
Here’s the link for applications: https://indianvisaonline.gov.in/visa/tvoa.html
The cost of the e-Visa is $60 US, a big improvement on before.
However, it’s worth noting some silly restrictions to this process:
1) The e-visa is only valid for 30 days from your first entry. As many people travel from Europe and spend 6 weeks or more in India, and considering India gets a lot of income from tourist receipts – way more, proportionally, than most other countries – you’d think they would try and boost that opportunity rather than likely curtail it.
2) You have to enter the country through one of 16 designated airports, a big improvement on the previous 9 that were listed: Ahmedabad, Amritsar, Bangalore, Chennai, Cochin, Delhi, Gaya, Goa, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, Tiruchirapalli, Trivandrum and Varanasi.
Finally, this process has until now been unavailable for UK citizens, but that looks set to change as Brits will be included as of Aug 15th 2015.