India has unusually cheap mobile data and unusually slow paperwork to get it. That tension is the whole decision.
The local SIM question
An Indian prepaid SIM is genuinely cheap — among the cheapest in the world per gigabyte. A travel eSIM cannot match it on price, and we are not going to claim otherwise.
What it costs instead:
- Your passport and a visa copy, plus a local address and photographs.
- Verification, which is not instant. Activation can take hours, and sometimes you must answer a verification call before the SIM works at all — difficult if it is the only SIM you have.
- A shop visit in a country where that can take an afternoon rather than ten minutes.
- Airport counters charge far more than shops in town for the same thing.
So the split is simple. Staying a month or more, or using a lot of data: buy locally. Travelling for two or three weeks, or arriving at night in Delhi and needing a ride immediately: an eSIM is worth the premium. You land connected and you never take your own SIM out.
Coverage
India's networks — Jio and Airtel chiefly — cover a remarkable amount of the country, and better than many visitors expect. Cities, towns, trunk roads and most railway lines have usable data.
Where it genuinely stops:
- Ladakh and the high Himalaya: long stretches with nothing. There is also a rule worth knowing, and it is not about borders: in Jammu and Kashmir, and historically in Ladakh, a prepaid SIM issued in another Indian telecom circle does not work at all — only postpaid roaming does. That catches people in Leh town, nowhere near a border. Do not build a plan around having data in Zanskar or on the Manali–Leh road.
- Spiti, Uttarakhand's upper valleys, Sikkim's north: coverage in the main towns, gaps on the roads between them.
- The northeast away from Guwahati and the state capitals: sparse.
- Desert and forest interiors — the Thar, the tiger reserves, inland Odisha: patchy to nothing.
- Long train journeys: signal follows the line of settlement, so expect it to come and go for hours.
Congestion is a different problem from coverage. In dense city areas at peak hours, speeds drop because enormous numbers of people share one cell. That is not a fault in your plan.
The phone number problem is worse in India than almost anywhere
A travel eSIM is data only, with no Indian number. India has built a great deal of daily life on SMS verification to an Indian mobile, and there is often no alternative:
- UPI payments normally require an Indian number tied to an Indian bank account. There is now a prepaid wallet aimed at inbound travellers, UPI One World, so the door is not completely shut — but getting onto it needs in-person verification at an airport or partner counter and an OTP sent to a number you can actually receive calls and texts on. A data-only travel eSIM cannot receive that, so on our eSIM alone you still will not get there.
- IRCTC train bookings, some domestic airline and hotel portals, and many app sign-ups verify by SMS to an Indian number.
- Ola and Uber drivers call, constantly, and cannot reach you.
- Some public wifi at stations and airports authenticates by sending an OTP to an Indian number.
What works: book trains through a third-party site that accepts an international number, carry cash and a card rather than relying on UPI, use in-app chat with drivers, and give your hotel's number where a local contact is demanded. If your trip depends on UPI, that is a reason to get a local SIM, not a reason to buy a bigger data plan.
How much data
- Ordinary sightseeing and maps: 2 GB per day is comfortable.
- Heavy photo and video uploads: 3 GB per day.
- Working remotely or tethering: 5 GB per day or more, and check the plan allows hotspot sharing.
Hotel wifi in India varies enormously — excellent in business hotels, barely functional in small guesthouses — so lean on your own data rather than assuming.
Where a plan slows after its high-speed allowance it keeps working; maps and messaging survive, video does not.