Buying a SIM card in India: counters, queues and the 24-hour wait

The short answer

Buy at the arrivals kiosk run by Airtel or Jio at whichever airport you land at, bring your passport, visa and a passport photograph, and expect the line to take longer than the transaction.

Then expect to wait. Activation can take up to 24 hours, which is the part nobody mentions until you are standing in the taxi rank with a dead SIM.

The airport counters

Delhi is the worst of the three by a distance. Forty-five minutes at peak, after immigration and baggage, on top of a long-haul flight, is a meaningful chunk of an arrival day — and it buys you a SIM that will not work until tomorrow.

Bangalore is the quickest, with Airtel only. Mumbai sits in between with both carriers present.

What to bring

Three things, and you need all of them:

• Passport
• Valid Indian visa
• A passport photograph

This is India's KYC registration regime, not a retailer's preference. There is no way around it at a counter, and it applies equally to eSIMs issued by Indian carriers. International travel eSIMs from providers such as Airalo, Saily, Nomad or Holafly are outside the scheme and require none of it.

Budget roughly $7 for a tourist data package. The bundles we recorded at these kiosks ran about 500 rupees, near $6, for 28 days with a gigabyte a day and unlimited calls. That figure has not been re-verified this month.

Off-airport

City carrier stores sell the same products with the same paperwork. The advantage over the airport is a shorter queue; the disadvantage is that you have to find one, get there, and still wait for activation.

For most visitors the airport kiosk is the better option simply because you are already standing there with your documents in hand.

Wi-Fi as a bridge

Since your local SIM may not work for a day, plan on Wi-Fi covering the gap.

It is good in hotels, at airports and in urban cafes, and patchy in rural areas and smaller towns. Major railway stations carry free Wi-Fi through RailWire, which is genuinely useful if your first move after landing is a train.

The eSIM route

If your handset supports eSIM — iPhone XS and later, most Android flagships — buying before you fly removes the queue, the document check and the activation wait in one step. You land connected.

Nomad lists $4 for 1 GB over seven days. The two ranges we have read at source are Saily's, checked on 16 August 2026, where 1 GB over seven days is $3.99 and 5 GB over 30 days is $13.99, and Airalo's, checked on 13 August, where 1 GB over three days is $4.

You will pay considerably more per gigabyte than the local bundle costs. That is the deal: roughly $2 to $3 a gigabyte against something closer to 20 cents, in exchange for skipping every friction point above.

The pragmatic move for a longer trip is to run both. Land on a small eSIM, queue for the local SIM when it suits you, and let the eSIM cover the 24 hours while registration clears.

One India-specific warning: the Holafly app is blocked on India's App Store. If Holafly is your provider, install and activate it before you arrive, because you will not be able to download it once you land.

Check your device against our eSIM compatible phones list, and see the India hub for the full plan comparison.