Treatment at hospitals in India: a guide for patients in Eswatini

The Indian medical visa

e-Medical Visa

Swazi passport holders can apply for India's e-Medical Visa online, without attending the High Commission in person to lodge the application. Eswatini is entry 51 on the official eligibility list. One thing to check if you look that list up yourself: it uses the country's current name, Eswatini. Older guidance and some out-of-date copies of the list still say Swaziland, so searching for the former name may make it look as though your country is absent when it is not. Applications are made on the official e-Visa portal, and the Indian hospital's letter is part of the file from the start.

Apply on the official Indian e-Visa portal

Indian mission

• India keeps a resident High Commission in Eswatini, and this is the thing most worth knowing before you start: you do not deal with Pretoria. It would be a reasonable guess, given the distance, and it is wrong — the mission in Pretoria is accredited to Lesotho, not to Eswatini.
• The High Commission of India in Mbabane is on the fifth floor of UN House, Quadrant B and C, Somhlolo Road, Mbabane. Its telephone is +268 24101621, and its office hours are 08:00 to 16:30, Monday to Friday.
• Because the online route is open to Swazi passports, most patients will not need to go there at all. It matters for anything the online form will not take.

Travelling with a family member

Two family members may travel with you, each on an e-Medical Attendant Visa tied to your own medical visa. Both are applied for on the same portal, and every traveller needs their own application, children included. Put the attendants in at the same time as the patient. Their visas depend on yours, so one applied for late is the usual reason a family ends up travelling separately.

Documents

• Because the application is made on the portal, the file you assemble is the portal's: the passport bio page, a recent front-facing photograph against a white background, and the Indian hospital's letter on its letterhead stating when you are expected to be admitted. The passport needs six months left on it and two blank pages, and you are asked to show a return or onward ticket and that the costs can be met.
• The Mbabane High Commission publishes no medical visa checklist of its own that we have been able to read. We confirm what is in force with it before you apply and hand that to you, so nobody is assembling a file from guesswork.

Visa rules differ by country and change often. Once a partner hospital accepts your case we arrange the hospital’s invitation letter and check the current rules with you before you apply.

Getting to India

Airports

Eswatini's civil aviation authority operates the country's airports, and names King Mswati III International Airport as the principal one. That is the airport to plan an international journey around. We do not list the others here. The authority's own page setting them out could not be read, and naming airports from memory is how wrong information reaches a page like this.

Routes to India

• No service from Eswatini to India could be confirmed on any airline's own pages, non-stop or otherwise, so a journey will involve at least one change and possibly two.
• We looked for a single-airline routing of the kind that serves some neighbouring countries and there is not one: the East African carrier whose network reaches Mumbai does not serve Eswatini at all. A routing does exist on that airline from Johannesburg, but we will not build your journey on the assumption that you can get yourself to an airport in another country first — that is the part that goes wrong, and it goes wrong at the border rather than at the airline desk.
• So this section stays short on purpose. We look at what is genuinely bookable from Eswatini with you once the treatment date is set, including whether a regional connection or a road crossing makes more sense for you.

Before you travel, check your own government’s current travel advice and your airline’s flight status.

Money

Currency

The lilangeni, ISO 4217 code SZL, numeric code 748, divided into 100 cents.

Treatments we coordinate

Our partner hospitals treat these conditions, among others. Where hospitals publish their own prices we show an indicative range; otherwise ask us for an estimate.

• Heart surgery
• Cancer treatment
• Orthopedics and joint replacement
• Spine and neurosurgery
• Kidney care and transplant
• Liver transplant
• Bone marrow transplant
• IVF and fertility treatment
• Neurology
• Eye surgery
• Cosmetic and plastic surgery
• Bariatric (weight-loss) surgery
• Dental care

Don't see your treatment? Send us your reports and we will ask the right specialists at our partner hospitals.

How it works

1. Send your medical reports.

   Share your reports and scans with us on WhatsApp, by email or through our form. Your doctor can also send them to us.

2. Receive a specialist opinion and cost estimate.

   Specialists at our partner hospitals review your reports. We send you their opinion, the treatment they recommend and a clear cost estimate.

3. We arrange your travel.

   We arrange the hospital's invitation letter for your medical visa and help you with flights, accommodation and airport pickup.

4. Treatment, return home and follow-up.

   We support you during treatment and recovery in India, and we stay in touch after you return home.

Our partner hospitals

We work with partner hospitals across India. Their specialists review the medical information on this website and discuss cases with referring doctors.

• Manipal Hospitals, Bengaluru / Pune / Gurugram / DelhiJCI-accredited
• Ruby Hall Clinic, Pune
• Jehangir Hospital, Pune
• Ramaiah Hospital, BengaluruJCI-accredited
• Kauvery Hospital, BengaluruJCI-accredited
• Aster Medicity, BengaluruJCI-accredited
• Fortis Hospitals, Bengaluru / Gurugram / NoidaJCI-accredited
• Apollo Hospitals, Bhopal / Bengaluru / Delhi / ChennaiJCI-accredited
• Medanta
• Artemis Hospitals

Talk to us about treatment in India

Send us your medical reports whenever you are ready, or ask us a question first. Coordination is free for patients.

For referring doctors

If you refer patients for treatment in India, we work alongside you. You submit the case through our online case form, and a specialist from our partner hospitals can discuss it with you by video call on request. We keep you informed during your patient's treatment and after they return home, so you can continue their care.