Indian passport ranked at 80th place | Singapore’s most powerful with visa-free travel to 192 countries
Chandigarh: Global citizenship and residence advisory company Henley & Partners has ranked Indian passport at 80th place with visa-free access to 57 countries.
The list of countries giving on-arrival visa to Indians is as follows:
OCEANIA: Cook Islands, Fiji, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Niue, Palau Islands, Samoa, Tuvalu, Vanuatu
MIDDLE EAST: Iran, Jordan, Oman, Qatar
CARIBBEAN: Barbados, British Virgin Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago
ASIA: Bhutan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Laos, Macao (SAR China), Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Timor-Leste
AMERICAS: Bolivia, El Salvador
AFRICA: , Burundi, Cape Verde Islands, Comoro Islands, Djibouti, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique,Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Zimbabwe
The strength of Indian passporthas moved up from 87th place in 2022 to 80th in 2023, giving its holders a visa-free access to 57 countries, the latest report put out by Henley and Partners showed.
The Henley Passport Index rankings are based on the number of destinations their holders can access without a prior visa, largely based on data from the International Air Transport Association (IATA). At 80th, the other two countries along with India are Senegal and Togo.
Meanwhile, Singapore has knocked off Japan from the top spot on the Henley Passport Index for the first time in five years, pushing the latter into 3rd place, the report said.
Singapore is now officially the most powerful passport in the world, with its citizens able to visit 192 travel destinations out of 227 around the world visa-free.
Germany, Italy, and Spain have moved up into 2ndplace with visa-free access to 190 destinations, and Japanese passport holders join those of six other nations Austria, Finland, France, Luxembourg, South Korea, and Sweden in 3rdplace with access to189 destinations without a prior visa.
The UK has finally turned the corner after a six-year decline, jumping up two places on the latest ranking to 4thplace, a position it last held in 2017.
The US, on the other hand, continues its now decade-long slide down the index, plummeting a further two places to 8th spot with access to 184 destinations visa-free. Both the UK and the US jointly held 1st place on the index nearly 10 years ago in 2014 but have been on a downward trajectory ever since.
Afghanistan remains at the bottom of theIndex, with a visa-free access of just 27, followed by Iraq (29), and Syria (30), the three weakest passports in the world.
The general trend over the history of the 18-year-old ranking has been towards greater travel freedom. The average number of destinations travellers are able to access visa-free has nearly doubled from 58 in 2006 to 109 in 2023.
.Christian H. Kaelin, Chairman of Henley and Partners and the inventor of the passport index concept, said only eight countries worldwide have less visa-free access today than they did a decade ago while others have been more successful in securing greater travel freedom for their citizens.
The UAE has added an impressive 107 destinations to its visa-free score since 2013, resulting in a massive leap of 44 places in the ranking over the past 10 years from 56tht o 12thposition. This is almost double the next biggest climber, Colombia, which has enjoyed a jump of 28 places in the ranking to sit in 37th spot, Kaelin added.
Ukraine and China are also among the Top 10 countries with the most improved rankings over the past decade.
Coming to the most open countries, the ‘Top 20’ are all small island nations or African states, except for Cambodia.
There are 12 completely open countries that offer visa-free or visa-on-arrival entry to all 198 passports in the world (not counting their own) — Burundi, Comoro Islands, Djibouti, Guinea-Bissau, Maldives, Micronesia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Samoa, Seychelles, Timor-Leste, and Tuvalu.
At the bottom of the Henley Openness Index, four countries score zero, permitting no visa-free access for any passport—Afghanistan, North Korea, Papua New Guinea, and Turkmenistan.
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