Modernising Borders: India’s Immigration and Foreigners Act (2025)

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Policy Update
Sruti Halder

Background

India’s immigration regime had, until 2025, been governed by four separate statutes spanning more than a century: the Passport (Entry into India) Act, 1920, the Registration of Foreigners Act, 1939, the Foreigners Act, 1946, and the Immigration (Carriers’ Liability) Act, 2000. Three of these predated the Constitution and were enacted amid the two World Wars.

According to the Act’s own Statement of Objects and Reasons, while the four laws shared a common underlying purpose, they contained overlapping provisions: carrier liability was governed separately under the 2000 Act, foreigner registration under the 1939 Act, and passport/visa entry requirements under the 1920 Act, splitting a single functional chain- entry, registration, and enforcement- across four disconnected statutes. The government introduced the Immigration and Foreigners Bill, 2025, in Parliament to consolidate this fragmented framework into a single, modern law aligned with contemporary security and administrative needs.

The Bill was passed by Parliament on 2 April 2025 and received Presidential assent on 4 April 2025, becoming Act No. 13 of 2025. The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) subsequently notified 1 September 2025 as the date of commencement, along with the accompanying Immigration and Foreigners Rules, 2025 and the Immigration and Foreigners (Exemption) Order, 2025.

The stated objectives are to regulate the entry, stay, movement and exit of foreign nationals; strengthen national security screening; and create a unified digital enforcement architecture (Rau’s IAS, 2025). The law repeals the four earlier Acts in their entirety. Its target beneficiaries and stakeholders include the Bureau of Immigration and its field offices, state police, carriers such as airlines and shipping lines, and institutions such as hotels, universities and hospitals that host foreign nationals, all of whom now carry defined statutory reporting duties. Genuine foreign visitors, including tourists, students and skilled workers, are intended beneficiaries of a more streamlined, digital process, while undocumented migrants and security-risk categories are subject to stricter scrutiny..

Among its key provisions, the Act statutorily establishes the Bureau of Immigration, headed by a Commissioner, supported by Foreigners Regional Registration Offices (FRROs) and Foreigners Registration Offices (FROs). It classifies foreigners into categories such as tourists, students, skilled workers, business visitors, and refugees or asylum seekers, and mandates an Immigration and Foreigners Information Management System (IIMS) built on biometrics and AI-based monitoring, integrated across airports, land checkpoints and registration offices (Rau’s IAS, 2025).

Penalties have been substantially enhanced: entering India without valid travel documents now attracts up to five years’ imprisonment and a fine of up to Rs 5 lakh, compared with Rs 50,000 under the 1920 Act, while using or supplying forged documents attracts 2–7 years’ imprisonment and fines of Rs 1–10 lakh. As an amendment concurrent with commencement, the Exemption Order, 2025 shields specified minority communities- Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Parsis from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who entered India on or before 31 December 2024, from penal action for lacking valid documents.

Functioning

The Bureau of Immigration functions as the apex operational authority, with FRROs (Regional Registration Office) in major cities and FROs, generally District Superintendents of Police, in other areas, handling registration, visa extension and exit clearance. Carriers are now required to submit advance passenger manifests before departure, and institutions accommodating foreigners, including hotels, universities and hospitals, must report their presence to registration authorities.

The IIMS is the backbone of implementation, designed to link biometric identification with airport immigration counters, land border checkpoints and FRRO systems for real-time verification (Rau’s IAS, 2025). Alongside the Act, the MHA has notified detailed Rules covering registration formats, exemption categories and carrier obligations (Vialto Partners, 2025). Funding for the Bureau of Immigration and associated border-management infrastructure is routed through the MHA’s Demand No. 51 (Police), which also finances the Central Armed Police Forces; the ministry does not publish a separately disaggregated head for the Bureau of Immigration in budget documents, making funding for immigration-specific functions difficult to isolate from broader policing and border allocations (Ministry of Finance, 2025).

A notable procedural shift concerns the burden of proof: under Section 16, when a person’s status as a “foreigner” is in question, the onus of proving otherwise lies with that person, reversing the earlier presumption structure.

Legal commentators have flagged that the Act’s residence-restriction powers under Sections 7(2)(f) and 13, combined with warrantless arrest under Section 26 and the “final and binding” inadmissibility determination under Section 3(1), lack a standalone provision setting a defined timeline for periodic judicial review, a gap discussed in relation to Articles 21 and 22 of the Constitution. As of early 2026, several implementing rules and standard operating procedures remain under active rollout, and full national integration of the IIMS across all immigration posts is still in progress.

Performance

Because the Act came into force only on 1 September 2025, a rigorous performance assessment must distinguish between the institutional and budgetary groundwork laid before commencement and the comparatively limited body of post-commencement implementation data now available. Much of the data typically cited in early commentary on the Act, including 2019–2024 tourism trends and the intensified deportation drives of late 2024 and early 2025, in fact reflects the pre-Act environment, and in the case of enforcement drives, was conducted under the outgoing Foreigners Act, 1946, since the new Act had not yet taken effect.

Institutional and budgetary baseline. The Union Budget 2025-26, tabled in February 2025, several months before the Act’s commencement, allocated Rs 2,33,210.68 crore to the MHA overall, up from Rs 2,19,643.31 crore in 2024-25 (Deccan Herald, 2025). This should be read as anticipatory capacity-building for the incoming regime rather than as expenditure incurred under the Act itself, since the funds were budgeted before the law existed in operative form.

Indicator2023-242024-252025-26 (BE)
Total MHA Budget (Rs crore)~1,96,0002,19,643.312,33,210.68
Police Demand No. 51 (Net, Rs crore)—1,46,634.82 (Actual)1,60,391.06
Border Management allocation (Rs crore)—3,7565,597 (+49%)

Source: Ministry of Finance, Union Budget Documents 2025-26, Demand No. 51, Police (Ministry of Finance, 2025); Deccan Herald (2025); The Tribune (2025). Note: allocations were finalised before the Act’s commencement and represent institutional preparedness rather than post-Act spending outcomes.

The border-management allocation rose by 49 percent, from Rs 3,756 crore to Rs 5,597 crore. Reporting attributes this rise to broader border-security concerns, including LAC disengagement talks with China and fencing disputes with Bangladesh, rather than to any specific government statement linking it to the Act’s enforcement mandate; no budget speech or PIB release reviewed here draws that connection explicitly, so it should be treated as contextual rather than confirmed causal allocation.

Similarly, the sharp rise in Bangladeshi and Rohingya deportations, from single digits in Delhi in 2022–2024 to over 2,000 in 2025, was driven by MHA directives issued in November 2024 and intensified after the April 2025 Pahalgam attack. Since the Act only commenced in September 2025, the bulk of this enforcement activity, particularly the documented cases of due-process concern, occurred under the powers and procedures of the outgoing 1946 Act, not the new law. Only deportation activity from September 2025 onward can properly be treated as a function of the new Act’s enforcement architecture, and disaggregated data for that specific window is not yet publicly available in official releases.

Early post-commencement indicators. Genuinely Act-attributable data remains sparse given the law’s recency. The clearest available indicator spanning the transition is e-visa issuance: 31.74 lakh e-visas were issued to tourists between November 2024 and November 2025, a period that includes roughly two months under the new Act (PIB, 2025), though the figure cannot be decomposed into pre- and post-commencement shares from the source cited.

Full-year tourism data for 2025, and enforcement statistics specifically dated to the post-1 September 2025 period, are the datasets that would allow a genuine assessment of the Act’s operational performance; as of this update, neither the Ministry of Tourism’s 2025 compendium nor MHA parliamentary replies have published enforcement or facilitation figures disaggregated by the Act’s commencement date (Ministry of Tourism, 2025).

Consequently, this section should be read as establishing the institutional and budgetary context into which the Act was launched, rather than as demonstrating measurable outcomes of the Act in operation. A meaningful performance review will require MHA annual reports, CAG audits, or parliamentary replies covering the period from September 2025 onward, none of which had been published as official releases at the time of writing.

Impact

The Act’s stated objective of consolidating fragmented, colonial-era legislation into a coherent single framework appears substantially achieved on paper, with the repeal of four Acts and codification of definitions, penalties and institutional roles into one statute. Industry assessments note that the shift toward centralised digital visa processing and mandatory sponsor reporting has begun changing compliance behaviour among corporates and educational institutions employing or hosting foreign nationals.

On the security objective, the sharp rise in detections and deportations of undocumented Bangladeshi nationals and Rohingya migrants across multiple states suggests intensified enforcement activities.  However, independent legal analysis notes that the pace of enforcement has, in some documented cases, outstripped due-process safeguards, with courts intervening; the Supreme Court granted interim protection in June 2025 to an individual in Assam whose foreigner status had been summarily determined by a Foreigners Tribunal.

On the facilitation objective aimed at genuine travellers, tourism recovery remains incomplete relative to the pre-pandemic benchmark: 2024 arrivals of 9.95 million stayed below the 10.93 million recorded in 2019, despite consistent year-on-year growth since the pandemic trough (Ministry of Tourism, 2025). It is worth noting that this data pre-dates the Act’s commencement on 1 September 2025, so it cannot be attributed to the new law either way; it instead reflects the trajectory the Act inherited. Whether the Act’s streamlined visa processing and new visa categories accelerate this recovery will only be assessable once 2025–26 tourism data, covering a full period under the new regime, becomes available. 

Emerging Issues

  • Data privacy and biometric governance: Mass collection of fingerprints, iris scans, and location data through the IIMS lacks a dedicated data-retention and deletion framework tailored to immigration records..
  • Risk of discretionary misuse: Broad discretionary powers to deny entry on vague “national security or sovereignty” grounds have drawn opposition concern about potential misuse against academics, journalists, and activists.
  • Fragmented budgetary transparency: Bureau of Immigration expenditure is subsumed within the broader Police Demand for Grants, limiting Parliament’s and the public’s ability to scrutinise immigration-specific spending (Ministry of Finance, 2025).
  • Incomplete institutional rollout: Full integration of IIMS across all immigration posts, FRROs and land checkpoints remains a work in progress more than a year after enactment.
  • Inconsistent exemption implementation: Uneven state-level understanding and application of the Exemption Order, 2025 for specified minority migrant communities risks arbitrary enforcement..

Way Forward

The most pressing legal gap concerns detention. Since the Act combines residence-restriction powers under Section 7(2)(f) and Section 13, warrantless arrest under Section 26, and a “final and binding” inadmissibility determination under Section 3(1) without a standalone provision setting defined review timelines, Parliament or the Ministry could introduce a statutory detention review mechanism through rules under Section 30, incorporating judicial or quasi-judicial oversight and fixed periodic review, to bring these powers in line with the due-process guarantees under Articles 21 and 22.

On the data front, the scale of biometric and behavioural information the IIMS is designed to collect calls for dedicated data protection rules specific to immigration records. These should specify retention periods, purpose limitation, and independent audit mechanisms, and should be harmonised with India’s broader data protection law so that biometric immigration databases do not operate outside the standards applied elsewhere in government data collection.

Budgetary transparency is a more tractable near-term fix. Because the Bureau of Immigration expenditure currently sits folded into the much larger Police Demand for Grants (Demand No. 51), Parliament has limited visibility into what is actually being spent on immigration functions specifically. Creating a disaggregated budget head for the Bureau within Demand No. 51 would let Parliamentary Committees and the CAG independently track immigration-specific spending against outcomes, rather than inferring it from aggregate police and paramilitary figures.

Given the sharp rise in enforcement activity following the 2025 crackdown, there is also a case for institutional oversight of how that enforcement is applied. A standing parliamentary or civilian review body could monitor enforcement patterns across states to guard against uneven or discriminatory application by religion, region, or political affiliation, functioning alongside, not instead of, ordinary judicial review.

Enforcement quality also needs standardisation at the operational level. The documented instances of wrongful targeting during 2025’s deportation drives point to inconsistent verification practices across states; standardising SOPs so that nationality verification is completed before detention, rather than after, would reduce the risk of Indian citizens or long-settled residents being caught up in identification sweeps.

On the facilitation side, the IIMS rollout itself remains incomplete more than a year after the Act’s commencement. Accelerating uniform deployment across all FRROs, FROs, land border posts, and airports, paired with multilingual digital interfaces, would ease compliance for students, tourists, and institutions who are meant to benefit from the law’s stated efficiency gains rather than absorb its administrative burden.

Finally, much of the pressure driving the 2025 enforcement surge stems from unresolved bilateral migration questions, particularly with Bangladesh on undocumented migration and Myanmar on Rohingya refugees. Strengthening bilateral repatriation frameworks with both countries, building on the repatriation discussions already underway with Bangladesh, would allow India to move toward safe, dignified, and legally sound return processes rather than ad hoc, court-challenged deportation drives.

References

About the Contributor

Sruti Halder is pursuing an MSc in Economics at the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics. She is committed to leveraging data-driven research and evidence-based policymaking to promote inclusive and sustainable socio-economic development.

Acknowledgment

I am writing to express my sincere gratitude to IMPRI (Impact and Policy Research Institute) for providing me with the opportunity to prepare this policy update article and for fostering a rigorous learning environment that connects research with public policy practice.

Reviewers: Sandra Menon, Sneha Kohli

Publisher: Pallavi Lad

Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and do not necessarily represent the views or policies of the organisation.

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