After you graduate
Rules read 19 Aug 2026
What India's own immigration authority currently publishes. Not a ranking, not a guarantee, and not the same as what any agent or forum will tell you. Whether someone actually obtains residence depends on occupation, points, funds and policy that can change between application and graduation.
Work during study
A foreigner on a Student Visa has no work rights at all. The Bureau of Immigration's own guidance for foreign students states this as a direct prohibition rather than an hours-based limit of the kind several other countries in this dataset publish: a Student visa holder must not take up any employment or business activity in India, full stop. Foreigners intending an internship instead use a separate, dedicated visa (Student (S-5) Visa) for that specific purpose, rather than a general work permission attached to the ordinary Student (S-1) visa.
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Route to permanent residence
India does not publish a distinct post-study job-search visa or a general permanent-residence status for a foreign graduate; the Bureau of Immigration's own materials describe only the ordinary Employment Visa route, open to any qualified professional (not graduates specifically) with a confirmed engagement from an Indian company, organisation, industry or undertaking, or a foreign firm executing a project in India. As a general rule the employed foreigner must draw a gross salary above Rs. 16.25 lakh a year, though the Government periodically notifies specific sectors exempt from that floor. The visa is tied to the sponsoring employer: no change of employer is permitted while the visa is current — someone who wants to switch jobs must leave India and apply for a fresh Employment Visa — and a person may not hold an Employment Visa for more than one employer at a time. Employment Visas are issued and renewed on a case-by-case, typically annual, basis rather than converting into a fixed permanent-resident status after a stated number of years the way several other countries in this dataset describe; this dataset found no published route from repeated Employment Visa renewal into any form of Indian permanent residence for a person with no Indian family or ancestral connection.
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Route to citizenship
Indian citizenship by naturalisation is governed by Section 6 of the Citizenship Act, 1955, published by the Ministry of Home Affairs. The Central Government may grant a certificate of naturalisation to an applicant of full age and capacity if satisfied they are qualified under the Act's Third Schedule (a distinguished contribution to science, philosophy, art, literature, world peace or human progress lets the Government waive some or all of those conditions instead). The Third Schedule's qualifications include: residence in India (or service under an Indian government) throughout the 12 months immediately before applying; residence or government service in India for at least 11 of the preceding 14 years in aggregate (reduced to 5 years for a Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian applicant from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan, under a 2019 amendment); good character; adequate knowledge of a language listed in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution (one of India's own scheduled languages, not necessarily English); and an intention to reside in India, or to continue in government, international-organisation or Indian-body service, after naturalising. On dual nationality: India does not recognise it. Section 9(1) of the same Act states that an Indian citizen who voluntarily acquires the citizenship of another country automatically ceases to be an Indian citizen — the same principle applies in reverse to naturalisation, and in practice an applicant must not hold another country's citizenship at the point Indian citizenship is granted.
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New entry added 19 August 2026. Two Indian government domains added to IMMIGRATION_DOMAINS in scripts/verify.mjs: boi.gov.in (Bureau of Immigration, Ministry of Home Affairs — the actual visa and stay authority) and mha.gov.in (the Ministry of Home Affairs itself, whose own site hosts the current consolidated text of the Citizenship Act, 1955). postStudyWork is left null: this dataset found no published job-search, practical-training or graduate-specific status distinct from the ordinary Employment Visa described under residencyRoute — a genuine gap in what boi.gov.in itself publishes for graduates specifically, not an assumption. Collection note: the Citizenship Act PDF from mha.gov.in returned raw binary bytes to this project's default fetcher; it was downloaded and converted with pdftotext (poppler-utils, -enc UTF-8 -layout) and archived via fetch-source.mjs --save, the pattern already used elsewhere in this dataset for PDF-only government sources. One textual nuance worth flagging for a future collector: the Third Schedule's clause (b) — which, before a 2004 amendment, explicitly required an applicant to have renounced any other country's citizenship — now reads only 'that, if he is a citizen of any country, [omitted]' in the current consolidated text, i.e. the specific renunciation wording was deleted by the 2004 amendment rather than replaced with new text; this entry's dual-nationality claim rests instead on Section 9(1)'s clear, currently-in-force statement that an Indian citizen automatically loses that citizenship on voluntarily acquiring another, which is unambiguous, rather than on the now-textually-uncertain clause (b). inDemandOccupations is left null: no shortage-occupation list gating the Employment Visa was found; the salary floor is a flat threshold with sector-based exemptions the Government notifies from time to time, not a named list of occupations. naturalisationStatus set to 'published-route': the Third Schedule states real, numbered, followable criteria, even though the residence requirement (11 of 14 years, or 5 of 14 for the named-minority exception) is among the longer qualifying periods in this dataset — per the doc comment on ResidencyPathway.naturalisationStatus this field records only whether criteria are published, not how long or attainable the route is. citizenshipTerms records 11 years, the aggregate the Third Schedule requires within the preceding 14 years. That sits on top of a separate requirement of continuous residence throughout the 12 months immediately before the application, so the qualifying history is 12 years in total; 11 is the figure the Act states. The Third Schedule reduces the aggregate to 5 years for a Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian applicant from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan under the 2019 amendment.
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