is it true that sim cards are now given free to tourists upon entry into India? No longer with red tape involved?
No this service has been "suspended". I got a Vodafone SIM recently at Delhi airport however. Took 10 minutes. 600 rupees which included 1GB data per day for 80 days. It took about 24 hours for everything to be working OK but after that I had no problems. The booth is to the right as you enter the arrival hall. Not sure about other airports.
we are flying into Delhi. is there still a lot of red tape involved and hoops to jump through?;
I have roaming package. I can use my phone in India as I would here in Canada, for $12 a day. They on my charge you for 10 days per billing cycle. But you can benefit from it for the entire 30 day billing cycle. That means at the most will be charged $120 on top of my regular phone bill. Would you say The cost savings of getting an Indian sim card to be great enough to justify not just going with the convenient route and use my roam package?
Definitely worth it. It took 10 minutes at the airport. I didn't have extra photos but they seemed happy with a picture taken on the spot. Might pay to take some extra passport photos just in case. Just needed my passport. They give you a sim and a phone number to call in a few hours when the application has gone through. This is just an automated call to re-register your passport number against the SiM I had to make one more call the next day to the Vodafone folk but they were very helpful and sorted my issue on the spot. The only glitch I had was a brief loss of coverage when travelling between states. Seems to need to register on each states network, bit like when we travel between countries. Coverage also seemed much better than in the past as well.
so you would you say it is significantly cheaper than me paying $120 through my roaming package?
I would love to get a sim card at the airport but will be arriving at 2am. Any chance they're open?
Use an ATM at the airport - not the Forex. Currency fluctuates every day ... so depends on how many rupees you carry vs getting a better rate in 2 weeks. You can bring CAD and exchange it without any issues - no need to pay the exchange fees to by USD, then pay them again to convert to INR. And don't go with roaming from Telus or whoever ... for $3.75 CAD you can get unlimited calls, and 1 gb of data a day - for a month.
Unrelated question: We are bringing cell phones, mp3 players and a c-pap machine. I have looked into this and all of these have been in converters or whatever the term is.
so can I bring a north American universal power bar and just take a few universal plug adapters for India and bulk the bar into a universal plug?
This topic has been automatically locked due to inactivity. Email community@lonelyplanet.com if you would like to add to this topic and we'll unlock it for you.