India document photos online

In 2018 India announced that millions of less-educated workers would receive orange-jacketed passports instead of the usual navy blue, with their home address removed and printed instead on an inner chip page. The colour was meant to flag "Emigration Check Required" travellers, but it instantly looked like a badge of class: critics warned it would brand poorer Indians as second-tier citizens at every border. The backlash was so fierce that the government scrapped the orange passport within weeks, before a single one was printed. The episode is a vivid reminder that a passport's colour is never just decoration.

• Orange passports India's 2018 plan to issue orange passports to less-educated emigrant workers was scrapped within weeks after outrage that the colour would brand them as second-class citizens.
• E-passport Since 4 September 2025 every new ordinary Indian passport is a chip-embedded e-passport, marked by a small gold symbol on the cover and packed with interlocking microletters and an encrypted RFID chip.
• Passport power In the 2025 Henley Passport Index the Indian passport sat around 85th place, giving holders visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to roughly 57 destinations.
• Biggest diaspora India has the world's largest diaspora, with around 18 million people born in India living abroad in 2020, the biggest clusters in the UAE, the United States and Saudi Arabia.
• Remittance king India has been the world's top recipient of remittances for over two decades, pulling in about $138 billion from its overseas citizens in 2024, nearly double second-place Mexico.
• Currency origin The rupee traces to the silver rupiya struck by Sher Shah Suri around 1540, a 178-grain coin whose weight stayed essentially unchanged into the 20th century.
• Cash shock On 8 November 2016 India voided its 500 and 1,000-rupee notes overnight, wiping out about 86% of all cash in circulation in a bid to flush out hidden wealth.
• Biometric ID India's Aadhaar is the world's largest biometric ID system, enrolling roughly 1.3 billion people via fingerprints, iris scans and photos under a single 12-digit number.
• Most populous In April 2023 India overtook China to become the world's most populous country, the UN estimating its mid-2023 population at about 1.43 billion.