Kochiculture & etiquette

If your visa runs beyond 180 days you must register within fourteen days of the arrival stamp. Kochi has one of India's fifteen full Foreigners Regional Registration Offices, located in the Airlines Building at Cochin International Airport rather than in the city — a twenty-five kilometre trip from Ernakulam if you are called in. The application itself is online at e-FRRO and requires proof of a Kerala address, so accommodation has to come first.

The Permanent Account Number gates salary, banking and your tax return. Foreign nationals must use Form 49AA — the free instant e-PAN requires an Aadhaar you cannot get for six months. Without a PAN your employer must deduct tax at a substantially higher rate, recoverable only by filing.

Kerala has India's highest life expectancy, lowest infant mortality and the country's most functional government hospital network, staffed by doctors who are often the same people you would see privately. Foreign nationals are still outside the public insurance schemes and will normally pay, but the practical point is that in a genuine emergency the nearest government hospital in Ernakulam is a reasonable destination rather than a last resort. In Delhi or Mumbai that calculation is the other way round.

Kerala received close to a fifth of all inward remittances to India in 2023-24, second only to Maharashtra, overwhelmingly from Gulf migration. That money went into land and houses for four decades, with the result that Kochi land and apartment prices sit far above what local incomes would support and well above cities with much larger economies. Rents are more reasonable than purchase prices, which is a strong argument for renting long before considering buying here.

Kerala is where the southwest monsoon makes landfall, around the start of June, and it is heavy. A second northeast monsoon follows in October and November. Kochi is low-lying, built across islands and canals, and the 2018 Kerala floods are recent memory. Ask specifically whether a prospective address floods, check the ground-floor question, and expect four months a year where an umbrella is not optional.

Kerala sells alcohol through the state-owned Beverages Corporation and licensed bars in higher-category hotels. There are no ordinary off-licences, outlet queues are a local institution, and dry days apply — though the 2025-26 policy has eased several of them and permitted service in some categories that were previously excluded. None of this is prohibition, but it is not a market you can navigate by instinct.