The Ministry of Tourism publishes on a monthly basis the number of e-tourist visas (formerly tourist visa on arrival) issued across the eligible countries. However, the documents containing such information are in portable document format (PDF) which is easily read by humans but typically are difficult for machines to interpret. Therefore, Magnus Lodefalk and myself, in a joint effort, provide the dataset in machine-readable format available for public consumption.
The dataset is a by-product of our long-term initiative on understanding India’s visa programme. The objective of making the data set available for the public at large is because we would like to increase transparency, accountability, and user-friendly access to government datasets so as to encourage researchers to think more on how India could benefit from opening its doors to international travelers. In addition, we want to help the government of India to combine its initiative on Digital India with its commitment on Open Government Dialogue.
The dataset provides information on the number of visas issued by the government of India under the e-tourist visa (formerly tourist visa on arrival) programme. For the purpose of facilitating semantic interoperability, the dataset incorporates Country Code" which is in line with the e-governance standard prescribed for Metadata and Data Standards (MDDS) - Demographic (Person Identification and Land Region Code) ): 01, Version 1.1, November, 2011", i.e. ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 standard. Metadata is in the same document. The dataset is available in machine-readable .xlsx format. Information is gathered from the press releases issued by the government of India on a monthly basis. The reference URL link shall take you to the original press release.
Since the dataset is available for free, all we would ask you to is reference us while using the same. Reference should be cited as “Agarwal and Lodefalk (2015). Dataset on India’s visa programme.”
All the errors are our own and if you do find discrepancies or errors, please do contact us at agarwana3@gmail.com or mlodefalk@gmail.com
The dataset is an ongoing effort and hence we update the dataset as and when there is a press release every month.
The dataset can be found at http://natagarwal.weebly.com/datasets.html