India Will Put A Foreigner Registration Office In Every State Capital By 2027

Foreigners living in several Indian states will no longer have to deal with an immigration office in a different state as India aims to extend its registration network to every state capital by 2027. Eight offices have been opened or notified since 2025, taking the current total to twenty

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Until recently, a foreign student or long-stay visitor in Mizoram was administered from Kolkata, more than a thousand kilometres away; one in coastal Andhra Pradesh dealt with Hyderabad, in a neighbouring state; and foreigners in Rajasthan were handled from Delhi. New offices have since opened at Jaipur, Chandigarh and Guwahati, followed this year by Aizawl and Amravati. Three more have been notified at Kohima, Agartala and Bhubaneswar.

The Foreigners Regional Registration Office is where a foreign national’s stay in India is formally managed. It carries out post-arrival registration for those required to complete it, issues registration certificates and residence permits, records changes of address, passport or travel plans, and grants permission to enter protected and restricted areas. It also issues exit permits to people whose visas have expired or who have overstayed, and handles visa violations and penalties.

Four of the eight new or notified offices are in the northeast, the region where foreign travellers most often need separate permission simply to enter particular districts. Three northeastern states — Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur and Meghalaya — are still without an office of their own, along with Bihar, Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand. The home ministry says it is working on those.

The expansion follows a direction from Home Minister Amit Shah, and the ministry attributes it to a substantial rise in the number of foreigners arriving for tourism, medical treatment and study. It gave no figures.

The offices now sit within a reorganised legal framework. The Immigration and Foreigners Act of 2025 merged four earlier laws governing the entry, stay, movement and departure of foreign nationals into a single statute, under which the Bureau of Immigration is assisted by regional registration officers.

Thirty-five services, including registration, visa extensions and visa conversions, are available online through the e-FRRO system, so not every transaction requires a visit.

The ministry describes the expansion as serving two purposes at once. It is going to make it easier for visitors to stay within the rules and make those rules easier to enforce.