Table of Contents
CURRENT AFFAIR
- Henley & Partners, the residence and citizenship planning firm has published the Henley Passport Index for 2020.
- Ranking is according to the number of destinations the respective passport holders can access without a prior visa.
Topics Covered
- Important International institutions, agencies and fora, their structure, mandate. Effects of liberalization on the economy, changes in industrial policy and their effects on industrial growth.
What to study?
- For Prelims and Mains: Passport Index- features, performance of various countries and significance of the index.
What is Henley Passport Index (HPI)?
- It is a global ranking of countries according to the travel freedom for their citizens.
- Started in 2006 as Henley & Partners Visa Restrictions Index (HVRI) and was modified and renamed in January 2018.
What is Passport Index?
- Passport index is an online tool that provides insights about visa-free travel option.
- The score also says how welcoming the countries are.
- The Passport index includes Visa-Frees score, World Openness score, Welcoming score and Global Mobility
- When these scores are high, passport index is also high and such a passport is said to be highly powerful.
Visa Free Destinations
- There are 58 destinations in the world that does not require prior Visa.
- 20 of the 58 are in Africa, 11 in Asia.
- There is no developed country or a major power in the world where Indians can travel without Visa.
- Serbia is the only European country where Indians are allowed to travel without visa.
How are the countries ranked?
- The ranking is based on data from the International Air Transport Association (IATA), a trade association of some 290 airlines, including all major carriers.
- The index includes 199 different passports and 227 different travel destinations.
Performance of various Countries
- Japan is at the top. It has been topping the Index for three straight years; according to the 2020 index, its citizens are able to access 191 destinations without having to obtain a visa in advance.
- Singapore, in second place (same as in 2019), has a visa-free/visa-on-arrival score of 190.
- Germany is No. 3 (same position as in 2019), with access to 189 destinations;
- The US and the UK have been falling consistently over successive Indices.
Performance of India
- The Indian passport is closer to the bottom, ranked 84th in the world.
- This translates into visa-free access to 58 destinations, including 33 which give Indians visas on arrival.
- Twenty of the 58 visa-free access destinations in the 2020 list are in Africa, and 11 each in Asia and the Serbia is the only European country to which Indian passport holders can travel visa-free.
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