Only 50 countries Indians can travel freely

By siliconindia   |   Monday, 27 September 2010, 15:17 IST   |    19 Comments
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Only 50 countries Indians can travel freely
New Delhi: Indians are among those who figure way down in the list of people with freedom to travel free of visa restrictions. Out of 193 countries surveyed in 2010, Indians have visa-free access to just 50 countries, reports Rema Nagarajan of the Economic Times. According to the latest visa restriction index rankings, United Kingdom is at the top with Britons having visa-free access to 166 countries. The U.S. has been slipping since the first index was published in 2006, when it ranked at the top along with Finland and Denmark. In 2008, it slipped to number 3 and in the current ranking, it stands at the seventh place. Henley and Partners, a firm that specializes in international immigration, consular and citizenship law, analyses visa regulations of a large number of countries in the world every two years to bring out the visa restriction index. The index ranks a country according to the international travel freedom of its citizens or the number of countries their citizens have visa-free access to. According to the index, Japan is the only Asian countries within the top 10 ranks. Singapore is at the 11th place followed by both Korea and Malaysia ranking 13. Maldives (56) is the only Saarc country that ranks higher than India (77). The rest follow India - Bhutan (83), Sri Lanka (84), Bangladesh (85), Nepal (88), Pakistan (90) and Afghanistan at the bottom.

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