From Kenya to India for Treatment: Costs, Flights, e-Medical Visa (2026)

For many years Kenyan families have been travelling to India for cancer care, cardiac surgery, kidney treatment, transplants, and orthopedic work, first under NHIF overseas referrals and today mostly as self-payers under the SHA framework. The corridor is one of the most established between Africa and India: direct flights, an online visa, English-speaking hospitals, and a large Kenyan-Indian community that has been making this journey privately for decades.

This guide covers the practical rails as of mid-2026 (visa, flights, money, and how to plan), written for whoever is organizing the journey: often the son, daughter, or family committee doing the research at midnight.

Organizing a treatment journey right now? Message us on WhatsApp or use our contact page. We respond within four business hours.

Why India, from Kenya

Three practical reasons come up in nearly every case we see:

1. Specialist depth. Complex oncology, cardiac surgery, neurosurgery, and transplant programs run at high volumes in India’s tertiary hospitals, with sub-specialists a referral system can reach.
2. Cost. Treatment in India is typically a fraction of the equivalent private cost in Europe, the Gulf, or South Africa, though the honest version of that sentence carries no percentage, because the real number depends entirely on your case. The only trustworthy cost figure is an itemized quote for your diagnosis, and you should demand one before committing to anything.
3. Reachability. Direct flights, an e-visa, and English throughout the clinical process make India one of the lowest-friction destinations available to Kenyan patients.

The e-Medical visa

As of mid-2026, Kenyan nationals are eligible for India’s e-Medical visa, applied for online. The broad shape of the process:

• Apply on the official portal only: indianvisaonline.gov.in. Third-party “visa agent” sites charge for what the portal does directly, and some are outright fraudulent.
• You will need a letter from the Indian hospital where treatment is planned. This is one reason hospital selection comes before visa application: the invitation can only come from the hospital you have chosen.
• Attendant visas exist for accompanying family members, linked to the patient’s visa.
• Rules, fees, and eligibility change. Confirm everything on the official portal at the time you apply, and be wary of any agent who claims they can “arrange” or accelerate a visa for a fee.

If we are coordinating your journey, the visa-invitation letter and your application dossier are part of milestone 2 of the full journey service. Our visa document checklist is free to anyone who asks, whether or not you use any paid service.

Direct flights: Nairobi to Mumbai

As of mid-2026, the Nairobi–Mumbai route is served non-stop by two carriers (Kenya Airways and IndiGo), with roughly 19 direct flights a week between them. That density matters for medical travel in ways tourists never notice:

• Admission dates move. A route with near-daily service lets you rebook without wrecking the plan.
• Attendants swap. On longer treatments, one family member flies home and another flies out.
• Follow-ups happen. A direct flight makes a review visit a long weekend instead of an expedition.

Schedules and frequencies change seasonally. Verify current timetables before locking travel dates to an admission date, and book flexible fares where the treatment calendar is uncertain.

What a treatment journey actually costs

We publish our own fees, and we do not publish treatment prices, because a treatment price that is not an itemized quote for your specific case is marketing rather than information. The honest structure of the budget looks like this:

INR equivalents of our fees are ₹4,300, ₹12,900 and ₹86,000 respectively. INR equivalents are approximate, at about ₹86 per US dollar. The USD figure is the fee.

Two budgeting rules we give every Kenyan family:

1. No comparable itemized quotes, no decision. Any hospital serious about your case can state, in writing, what is included and what is excluded. We provide three, side by side, as the first milestone of a coordinated journey.
2. Add an honest buffer. Complications, extended stays, and exchange-rate movement are normal, not exceptional. A budget with no headroom is a plan to run out of money abroad.

SHA, harambee, and how journeys are funded

Since the NHIF-to-SHA transition, state funding for overseas treatment is capped and conditional: a set annual amount per patient, a defined list of procedures, and approved hospitals. In practice, most Kenyan treatment journeys to India are now funded the way they long were underneath the official layer: family pooling, harambee, M-Changa and M-Pesa-based crowdfunding, SACCO loans, and diaspora relatives. Publicly documented Kenyan crowdfunding campaigns have raised several million shillings for single India treatment cases.

We wrote two companion guides for this situation: Beyond the SHA cap: a Kenyan family’s guide to self-pay treatment in India, and a checklist for harambee committees on verifying quotes and keeping the money clean. The short version: fundraising committees need itemized, verifiable documents, and a facilitator whose fee is published and flat is easier to account for to donors than one whose income is hidden inside the hospital bill.

If you hold an OCI card

Kenya’s community of Indian descent is large, and many hold Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) cards. OCI holders do not need a medical visa at all, which removes the invitation-letter dependency and makes the journey simpler to schedule. For OCI families arranging treatment for relatives, the teleconsult and written second opinion work remotely, before anyone books a flight.

How we fit in — and who pays us

Medtu Care is a medical travel facilitator. We are not a hospital, and we do not provide medical care. All medical decisions rest with you and your treating doctors. We work only for you: case assembly, independent specialist opinions, three itemized hospital quotes compared side by side, admission and rate-lock coordination, the visa dossier, travel through our travel arm Tripcuro, on-ground coordination, and a line-by-line audit of the discharge bill against the rate locked at admission.

We take no commissions from hospitals. Our fees are paid by you, published upfront, and itemized separately from your hospital bill. You always pay the hospital directly. Full details, including milestone and refund rules, are on the fees page, and the corridor page for Kenya is at /international/from-kenya/.

Start with a conversation, not a commitment. Tell us the diagnosis and what has been advised: message us on WhatsApp or use the contact page. We respond within four business hours, and hearing our honest read on your case costs nothing.

Sources

• e-Visa eligibility and visa terms — Government of India. Kenya listed among the eVisa-eligible countries; e-Medical visa issued for one year from arrival with multiple entries, with a maximum of two e-Medical Attendant visas granted against one patient’s e-Medical visa, applied for 4 to 120 days before arrival. Accessed 28 July 2026.
• The Social Health Insurance (General) Regulations, 2024 — Ministry of Health, Kenya — Regulations 36, 39 and 63: treatment outside Kenya is payable only where the service is not available in Kenya, at a facility contracted by the Authority and linked to an empanelled Kenyan facility, on prior authorisation, against a list of eligible services set each financial year by the Benefits Package and Tariffs Advisory Panel, and only up to a beneficiary’s annual limits. Accessed 28 July 2026.