The Rajya Sabha on Wednesday passed the Immigration and Foreigners Bill, 2025, a legislation aimed at strengthening security procedures for and monitoring of visitors, including new provisions for real-time tracking of people entering, staying, and exiting the country, along with steeper penalties for violators.
The bill, already passed by the Lok Sabha on March 27, was cleared by a voice vote after a debate and will now be sent for President Droupadi Murmu’s approval. Several members of the Opposition red-flagged the sweeping powers given to the immigration bureau under the bill. They said the bill treated all foreigners with suspicion and some of its provisions violated the privacy of individuals.
Replying to the debate, Union minister of state for home Nityanand Rai said India would always welcome visitors, citing the country’s “centuries of history as a welcoming place”. He said an updated immigration law was necessary for the country to check anybody with “mala fide intentions” from entering India.
The bill proposes repealing four laws, namely the Passport (Entry into India) Act, 1920, Registration of Foreigners Act, 1939, Foreigners Act, 1946, and the Immigration (Carriers’ Liability) Act, 2000, replacing them with a single legislation.
“The bill will enable foreigners to deal with a single authority. This will ease their compliance burdens. Where are we talking of stopping anybody from coming (to India)? We are only talking of monitoring here,” the minister of state said, adding the current laws on immigration were scattered and overlapping in nature.
With the passage of the legislation, there will be a “complete, integrated and up-to-date record of every foreign national coming to India”, the minister said, adding that the country has to be tough with people who come in and carry out activities that harm the nation’s interests.
Intervening in the debate, Congress MP Abhishek Singhvi demanded that the bill be referred to a standing committee because it proposed to give “excessive power to lowly officials and lacks provisions for appeal, oversight, and accountability, among other things” and made the decision of an immigration officer final and binding.
The Congress MP said the Constitution guaranteed certain well-enshrined rights to even non-citizens. The bill empowers the central government to refuse entry or deport any foreigner on “such other grounds as the central government may specify”, other than the grounds of national security, sovereignty and public health, he said.
“Is this not the worst kind of license for arbitrariness, for harassment, for fear and intrusive behaviour by a bureaucracy already known for its excessiveness and already functioning under a control freak government?” Singhvi asked.
According to its provisions, the bill places the onus of reporting foreigners on those who provide housing, education, or healthcare to them in the country. Many Opposition lawmakers said these provisions violated the privacy of foreign individuals. “If a foreign national studies in India or comes here for medical treatment, they have to only give information online. But information they must give,” the minister of state Rai said.
The bill provides steeper penalties for violations, including jail terms of up to seven years and fines of up ₹10 lakh up from two years and a fine of ₹1 lakh in the older laws.
Replying to the debate on the bill in Lok Sabha earlier on March 27, home minister Amit Shah had said, “India is not a Dharamshala (shelter) where anyone can come and settle for any reason, and the Parliament has the authority to stop those who pose a threat to national security.”
On Wednesday, Rai told the Rajya Sabha that the government ought to “keep track of who is coming, where he or she is staying, and why he or she has come”.
All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam lawmaker M. Thambidurai said the bill will negatively impact Sri Lankan Tamils who come to the country and seek refuge from persecution.
Trinamool Congress MP Sushmita Dev criticised the government for saying, on the one hand, that the bill was a “mere consolidation of existing laws and claiming, on the other hand, that this was a “paradigm shift”. “If there is a paradigm shift in policy, then we as parliamentarians have every right to demand that this bill be subjected to legislative scrutiny of Parliament”.
She said the bill dealt with not only foreigners but also several “critical areas”, such as immigrants, citizenship, passports, voters, detention camps, and D-voters (or doubtful voters).
“Since this government came to power in 2014, it has politicised the issue of immigration. Assam is an example of their twisted ideology,” Dev said.
Assam has a longstanding issue of illegal immigration from Bangladesh and the state carried out a controversial exercise to draw up a registry of citizens. The state, on August 31, 2019, published a National Register of Citizens (NRC) under the Supreme Court’s watch, which declared 1.9 million of Assam’s 32.9 million applicants non-citizens.
“Today, after running from pillar to post, after selling their house to prove citizenship in NRC, these people don’t know whether they are citizens or not,” she said, adding that the government had “time and again used the issue of immigration for polarisation”.
Replying to these allegations, Rai accused the Opposition of misleading the house on the bill. He said one of the accusations of the Opposition was that the bill would be used to prevent the entry of foreign intellectuals.
“We are not opposed to experts coming from abroad. We welcome people who come to India to do research and contribute, through their expertise, in the nation’s development.”
The minister said the bill had “clearly defined provisions” to make arrests, deport, and track foreigners. “It provides for the arrest and deportation of anybody violating the law, and this is necessary from the national security point of view,” Rai said.