Tushar Tayal is a visa consultant and the founder and CEO of Experience Travelidea, a consultancy he built from Tezpur in Assam and now runs from Assam and Dubai. The question he gets asked most often by people outside the region is why a visa file from the North East takes longer to put together than the same file from Delhi.
The paperwork is identical. The fee is identical. The processing is done by the same officers reading the same criteria.
What is different is everything that happens before the application is submitted.
Do the arithmetic once and the problem is obvious
Most foreign missions in India sit in New Delhi. Consulates and biometrics centres cluster in a small number of large cities. For a founder in a metro, an appointment is a morning. Book a slot, take a cab, submit, go back to work.
For a founder in Tezpur, the same appointment is a trip.
It begins with a road journey to Guwahati. Then a flight. Then a night in a hotel, because appointment slots do not arrange themselves around flight schedules. Then the appointment itself, which takes twenty minutes. Then a flight back, then the road journey home. Two working days gone, minimum. Often three.
[NEED: current list of visa application centres operating in Guwahati and which missions they serve, with the date checked. This determines how often the trip is avoidable.]
Now add the money. Flights, accommodation, ground transport, meals, and the cost of whatever did not get done at the office for two days.
[NEED: representative round-trip airfare and one night’s accommodation for a Guwahati–Delhi trip, with the month and year the figure was checked.]
The application fee never changes. The total cost of the application changes enormously.
The surcharge applies to failure too
This is the part that does not get discussed, and it is the part that changes behaviour.
A refusal is expensive for anyone. It costs the fee and the trip. But for a metro applicant it costs an afternoon on top of that. For an applicant travelling in from the North East, a refusal costs the entire journey again — the flights, the room, the days — because the second attempt requires the same physical presence as the first.
So the expected cost of applying is higher, not because the odds are different, but because the penalty for the bad outcome is larger.
People respond to that rationally. They apply for fewer things. They apply later, when the trip is certain, which leaves less buffer. They send one person instead of two. They decide that the trade fair is probably not worth it this year.
None of those decisions look like a policy problem from the outside. Each one looks like a business judgement. In aggregate they are a tax on enterprise in exactly the districts that are supposed to be growing.
Why capacity does not follow the demand
There is a circularity here that is worth naming.
Missions and their service providers site application capacity where demand density justifies it. Demand density is measured by applications received. Applications received from a region are suppressed by the absence of nearby capacity, because the trip cost discourages marginal applicants.
Low application volume from the North East is therefore read as low demand, which justifies not adding capacity, which keeps the volume low.
The demand is not low. The cost of expressing it is high.
What a consultancy can actually do about it
Some of this is policy and out of any private firm’s hands. A meaningful part of it is not.
Get the file right the first time. A large share of the friction traces back to how an application is assembled. Financial documentation that is complete but not legible as a narrative. A purpose of travel stated in the form and unsupported by anything in the annexures. Ties to India asserted rather than evidenced. An itinerary that contradicts the cover letter. These are craft problems. They are learnable, and for an applicant who has to fly in to submit, getting it right on the first attempt is worth far more than it is to someone who lives twenty minutes from the centre.
Sequence travel around passport availability. The passport sits with the mission during processing. One badly timed application can block a quarter of travel. Planning the year backwards from the trips that matter most is unglamorous work that saves real money.
Batch the trips. If a team of four needs biometrics, four separate journeys is four times the cost of one coordinated one. Corporate travel desks in metros do this instinctively. Businesses outside them often have not been shown that it is an option.
Be honest about odds before the money is spent. Telling a client that a particular application is weak, and what would make it stronger, is more useful than submitting it and hoping. Especially when the submission costs a flight.
That is most of what Experience Travelidea does, and it is why the firm was built where it was rather than in a metro.
The region is not short of reasons to travel
Assam’s outbound demand is not theoretical. It is students choosing between universities in four countries. It is tea and agri exporters who need to meet buyers. It is a tourism sector with international interest. It is a growing base of founders whose customers are not in India.
Experience Travelidea was recognised by Startup India in April 2024. In February 2025 it was featured as a standout startup at Advantage Assam 2.0 and acknowledged by the Chief Minister of Assam, Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma, with coverage in The Sentinel on 2 March 2025.
The point of mentioning that here is not the recognition. It is that an investment summit designed to attract capital into Assam had a visa consultancy on its list of notable startups. That is a signal about what the region’s businesses currently find difficult.
[NEED: number or share of Travelidea clients originating from tier-2 and tier-3 towns, with the period it covers.]
What would move the needle
Four things, in rough order of how quickly they could happen.
More biometrics capacity in Guwahati, serving more missions. This is the single highest-leverage change and it is operational rather than diplomatic.
Mobile or periodic enrolment camps for regions that do not justify permanent facilities. Other administrative services in India already work this way.
Longer multi-entry validity for applicants with clean travel histories, which reduces the number of times anyone has to make the trip at all.
Better documentation practice at the applicant’s end, which is the piece that does not require anyone’s permission to fix.
The first three need policy attention. The fourth is available today, and for a founder in Tezpur weighing up whether a meeting in Europe is worth two days and a flight, it is the difference between the trip happening and the trip staying hypothetical.
Tushar Tayal is an Indian entrepreneur and visa consultant, and the founder and CEO of Experience Travelidea, which operates from Assam and Dubai with a team of 70. For business and partnership enquiries: tushar.ceo@travelidea.in. For speaking and training: hello@tushartayal.com
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