Indian passport now ranks 86th in terms of travel freedom according to the Henley Passport Index, with a visa-free or visa on arrival access to 58 countries and territories. The rank has lowered with a drop of seven places in the past six months. Henley Passport Index provides a ranking of the whole of 199 passports of the world on the basis of the number of countries their holders can travel to visa-free.
The index, prepared by Henley & Partners, is being followed by the data from the International Air Transport Association (IATA). According to its recent updates, Japan and Singapore are the top rankers on the ground of visa-free travel access. Finland, South Korea and Germany have occupied the second place while the US and the UK have been ranked sixth.
The above information shows that multiple nations can occupy a single rank, which means the number of countries having stronger passports than India is actually more than 85. This definitely is not a good thing for India.
If will go by the past records, India’s trend on the index is actually fluctuating. In 2014, the country was ranked 76th but it dropped to 85 in 2016 before moving up to 81 in 2018. However , this time India’s rank has improved from the earlier position of 79th in January 2019.
China performs better than India with a rank of 74 and visa-free access to 70 countries.
Other than its Henley passport ranking, India also ranks last among its BRICS (an association of five major emerging national economies) counterparts as per the latest survey. Brazil here leads the way with a rank of 18 and visa-free access to 169 countries this year. With a rank of 51, Russia comes next, being followed by South Africa at 54 – both nations have visa-free access to 116 and 99 countries respectively.
Such rankings must be raising some concern for India and the nation needs to make a considerable jump so that its citizens can avail more visa-free travel globally.
But according to the former Indian ambassador to the US, Arun Kumar Singh, “We should not pay much attention to this report. This is clearly because of the country’s population size. There is both skilled and unskilled illegal migration taking place from India. Every nation, for its own reasons, wants to control the number of people it wants to permit.”
