Until this notification the e-Visa was, in practice, an air traveller's facility. A visitor could apply online and fly in, but someone crossing a land border still had to go through the conventional visa process, which meant a physical application and, usually, a trip to a mission. Nine of the eleven additions are land ports, and their placement tells the story: Agartala, Gede, Ghojadanga, Haridaspur and Dawki face Bangladesh, Jaigaon faces Bhutan, Darranga is on the Assam-Bhutan frontier, Moreh is the crossing into Myanmar, and Attari is the road crossing to Pakistan. These are the routes used by short-haul regional traffic - medical travel, family visits, small trade, pilgrimage - which is the segment for which the cost and delay of a conventional visa weigh most heavily relative to the length of the trip. The two airport additions point in a similar direction, extending the facility beyond metropolitan gateways: Bhopal serves central India and Tirupati serves a major pilgrimage circuit.

Visa policy is where two objectives that pull in opposite directions have to be reconciled - facilitating legitimate travel and controlling entry. The e-Visa was introduced in 2014 explicitly as an instrument of both: liberalising and simplifying the visa regime while strengthening the technological infrastructure available to immigration authorities, since an online application creates a verifiable record before the traveller arrives, which a visa stamped at a counter does not. Expanding the facility to land borders is the harder half of that bargain. Land crossings are typically less automated than international airports and handle the traffic that is hardest to document, so extending an electronic facility there depends on the immigration systems at each post being able to read and verify the authorisation. For an answer on tourism or ease of travel, the concrete gain is that regional visitors can now plan an overland trip online; for an answer on internal security, the point is that the same notification widens the number of posts at which that verification capability has to actually work.