eSIM for India

India does more on mobile data than almost anywhere else on earth, and as a visitor you inherit that infrastructure the moment your profile registers. The practical consequence is that your phone stops being a travel accessory and becomes the thing you book trains with, pay auto drivers through and read menus in. The other consequence is that India is enormous and wildly uneven, so what "good coverage" means in Bandra is not what it means on a road above Leh.

Getting online when you land

Long haul arrivals land mostly at Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad or Chennai, and the immigration queues at the big international terminals are long enough that your profile will have registered before you reach the front. Switch it on while you are taxiing or waiting, then check you have a mobile network name showing in the status bar before you leave the terminal building.

Load the profile onto your phone at home, on wifi. This matters more in India than in a small country, because the first thing you will want on landing is a prepaid taxi or an app cab, and the app cab pickup points at Indian airports are meeting a driver you can only find by calling or messaging him. That call happens over your data connection. Have it ready before you walk out of arrivals at two in the morning.

Confirm that roaming is switched on for the travel profile and that it is set as your default for mobile data, while your home line stays available for one time passcodes from your own bank. Indian services will not text you; the profile is data only, which is fine because everyone here communicates on WhatsApp anyway.

The networks you'll be on

Three operators appear on this profile: Bharti Airtel, which runs 3G, 4G/LTE and 5G, plus Vodafone Idea and Fascel India, each on 3G and 4G/LTE. The workhorse across the country is 4G, and it is deployed at a density that would embarrass a lot of richer markets. Where 5G is available on Airtel, it is concentrated in the metros and larger cities rather than spread thin.

A note on behaviour rather than technology. Indian networks are heavily loaded, and time of day changes your experience more than the radio generation does. A connection that flies at seven in the morning can crawl at nine in the evening in a dense residential district. If you have something important to upload, do it early.

Where coverage holds, and where it thins

The metros are comprehensively served: Mumbai, Delhi and the wider NCR, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai and Calcutta all give you fast, dense service including on the metro rail systems and the ring roads. The golden triangle tourist corridor, the expressways between major cities, and the main rail trunk routes hold up well, though a moving train will hand you between masts constantly and video will stutter even when messaging is fine.

Then the country changes character. Goa is well covered along both the north and south beach strips, with weaker patches inland and on the river ferries. Kerala is good in Kochi, Trivandrum and along the coastal highway, and noticeably thinner out on the backwaters once your houseboat leaves the main channels. Rajasthan is solid in Jaipur, Udaipur and Jodhpur and fades into the Thar towards the border, where long desert runs and camel camps sit outside anything useful.

The mountains are the real gap. Ladakh has service in and around Leh and very little across the high passes, the Nubra and Pangong roads, or the Zanskar side. The same applies to Spiti, the upper Himachal valleys and the Uttarakhand trekking approaches: valley floors and towns yes, ridges and passes no. The northeastern states, the hill districts of Meghalaya and Arunachal, tribal Odisha and the Sundarbans delta all range from patchy to absent, and the Andaman and Nicobar islands vary sharply between Port Blair and everywhere else.

What you'll actually use data for here

Transport, first and last. App cabs and app booked motorbike taxis are the default way to move in every big city, and the driver conversation is a phone call. Indian Railways bookings, live train running status and platform numbers all live online, and platform numbers here genuinely change. Metro tickets in several cities are QR codes on your screen.

Food delivery is unusually good and unusually cheap, and it is the answer to the first evening when you cannot face going out. Payment counters everywhere display QR codes for the national instant payment system, and while most visitors end up on cards and cash instead, you will still be scanning menus, tracking parcels and translating signage constantly. Maps are essential in cities where the address is a landmark rather than a street number, and where "opposite the temple" is the actual direction you will be given.

Before you fly

Install and verify the profile at home, and confirm your phone shows it as a second line rather than replacing your existing one. Download offline maps for every city on your route plus the road corridors between them; the corridors are the bit people forget.

Save your hotel addresses in local script where you can, screenshot train ticket PDFs rather than trusting an inbox you may not reach, and put your driver and guide numbers in your contacts before you need them. Carry a power bank, because a day of navigation, heat and constant screen use will finish a battery well before dinner. And check your handset supports eSIM before buying, since a profile that will not install is a bad discovery to make in an arrivals hall.