Several Indian missions abroad, including the Embassy of India in Berne, issued an identical notice on 22 October clarifying a long-standing pain-point for Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) card holders. Under amended rules introduced in 2025, OCI holders must upload each new passport into the OCI online portal, but many airlines and immigration officers had insisted on seeing the final electronic acknowledgement before allowing boarding. The new advisory states emphatically that “there shall be no restrictions on the OCI cardholders to travel to/from India during the period between issuance of a new passport and the final acknowledgment of the updated documents in the online system.” Travellers are, however, advised to carry both the old passport (bearing the OCI number) and the new one to facilitate inspection. The clarification removes uncertainty for millions in the Indian diaspora who renew passports roughly every ten years. For mobility programmes, it means employees with newly issued foreign passports can proceed with scheduled home-leave or assignment travel without waiting for bureaucratic confirmation—provided they have submitted the online update. Airlines will need to retrain check-in staff, many of whom still rely on outdated Timatic copies that flag OCI cards as invalid without the acknowledgment. Travel managers should distribute the embassy notice to passengers and advise them to print a hard copy in case of mis-informed airline agents en route. Longer-term, the government is piloting an e-OCI smart-phone credential that would link live passport data and remove the need for manual updates, but officials say wide rollout is unlikely before 2028.
Source: Embassy of India, Berne
