Originally Posted by
Bandicoot
How would this really help anyone? Most OCI holders will still need to carry their national passports for travel out of India when they need to leave, so you're not saving on carrying just one document. The set of people who need to travel urgently to India on their OCI but who don't have a valid national passport must be vanishingly small.
Much more practical and useful (IMO) would be the following:
* Change the format of the OCI to be a credit-card size document (like a US passport card, "green card", or Global Entry card, or driver's license, etc.) so it's easy to carry. There seems to be zero need for the paper pages in the OCI (has anyone heard of any endorsements or remarks being added in the OCI booklet??)
* Just declare it as sufficient as an ID for most things in India - hotels, domestic flights or other travel, getting a SIM card, or 1,001 other things an OCI holder might want to do in India on a short or long stay.
I agree with these points. Standard ID card size would be great. Also, probably won’t be popular, but these should be required to have an expiration date and be updated every ten years for security purposes. A 21 year old could get one and not have to do any updates to their details or photo until well into their 50s. This would be in line with most documents most importantly a passport. Better not to have passengers travel with 30 year old documents. India got rid of hand written passports in line with ICAO regulations but is still dragging its feet on actually requiring all handwritten PIOs to be converted to machine readable passports. The reason being it’s much more secure. Likewise documents with expiration dates should be required, otherwise they could be sold endlessly on the black market perhaps.