Scuba Diving in Andaman: Costs, Courses, Dive Sites and Rules

Scuba diving in Andaman costs roughly ₹2,500 to ₹6,500 for a beginner dive and ₹28,000 to ₹35,000 for an entry-level certification. Havelock, Neil and Port Blair hold most dive sites. November to April gives the best conditions. Beginners and non-swimmers can dive to 12 metres with an instructor.

What a scuba dive actually is

Scuba means you breathe compressed air from a tank through a regulator, so you stay under for 30 to 45 minutes instead of holding your breath. A buoyancy jacket keeps you hanging mid-water. On an introductory dive the instructor controls that jacket for you and stays within arm’s reach throughout, so you are experiencing a dive rather than performing one. If you want the skill itself, you need a course.

What makes the Andamans good for scuba diving

The numbers, not the adjectives:

• Visibility. Commonly 15 to 30 metres from November to April. The Directorate of Tourism’s own low-risk threshold for a dive is visibility above 4 metres, so in-season conditions sit far above the regulatory floor.
• Water temperature. Roughly 26 to 29 degrees Celsius all year. A 3 mm shorty is usually enough, and many divers skip the wetsuit entirely.
• Depth of beginner sites. The shallow reefs sit between 3 and 12 metres, which is exactly where an uncertified diver is legally allowed to be.
• Boat times. Most dive sites around Havelock Island are 10 to 60 minutes from the jetty, and Neil’s Jetty Channel Marker is about 10 minutes out. You are not spending half a day in transit.
• Site count. Havelock alone has over 20 established, named dive sites, with more around Neil, Chidiyatapu and Rutland. The Directorate’s Annexure IV lists 18 permitted diving zones.
• Reef types. Fringing hard coral gardens close to shore, coral slopes and walls at intermediate depth, and rocky pinnacles and open-sea reefs such as Pilot Reef and Minerva Ledge for certified divers.

Types of diving in the Andamans

• Shore dives. You walk in from the beach. Nemo Reef at Beach No. 2 in Havelock is the standard one, shallow at around 6 metres and the cheapest option because no boat is involved.
• Boat dives. A 10-to-60-minute ride, then a back-roll entry. Better reef, more fish, higher price. Not ideal if you are anxious in open water or prone to seasickness.
• Introductory dives for uncertified divers. Known as Discover Scuba Diving with PADI or Try Scuba with SSI. Briefing, shallow-water skills, then one supervised dive to a maximum of 12 metres. No certification results from it. If breathing underwater is the part that worries you, snorkelling in the Andaman Islands shows you the same shallow reefs from the surface.
• Certified fun dives. For anyone holding an entry-level card. Single or double tank, 45 to 60 minutes underwater, and access to the deeper sites.
• Night dives. Offered mainly out of Havelock. The guidelines require every diver to carry a marker light and a backup torch.
• Liveaboards. Limited and seasonal. Charter expeditions must be booked three to six months ahead.

Scuba diving courses in the Andamans

Course content and limits come from the training agencies, not from the dive centre. Fees are indicative ranges from Havelock and Port Blair operator rate cards as of September 2026, before 18% GST.

Advanced Open Water is genuinely cheaper than Open Water at most island dive centres, which looks like an error and is not. Open Water carries a confined-water session, more classroom time and three to four days of instructor commitment. Advanced is five dives over two to three days with no confined-water block.

Best time for scuba diving in Andaman

If you have one week and no flexibility, aim for December to March. If you want the same water with fewer people, late February to April is the better trade. Diving in June to September is possible on a sheltered shore site, but the odds of a cancelled or murky dive are high enough that you should not build a trip around it. Our guide to the best time to visit the Andamans covers how the same months affect ferries and beaches.

Conditions that affect a Scuba dive in Andaman

Depth. Deeper is not better. It shortens bottom time, and beyond 18 metres colours flatten and the reef often gets less busy, not more.

Visibility. Driven more by tide and plankton than by surface weather. Light rain rarely ruins a dive. A big tidal exchange over a sandy bottom will.

Current. The permitted-conditions benchmark is a current you can swim against with minimal effort. Anything stronger belongs to certified divers with good buoyancy control.

Weather and sea state. Swell above half a metre makes boat entries and exits difficult. Operators cancel on the morning when the sea is up, and a good one does exactly that rather than pushing the trip through.

Reef health. Shallow inshore patches carry more bleaching damage than the deeper open-sea reefs. Expect healthy coral, not perfect coral.

Marine life. Turtles, clownfish across five species, giant clams, stingrays, batfish, barracuda and white-tip reef sharks are all realistic. Mantas and dugongs are occasional, not scheduled.

Best dive sites in the Andamans

Sites below come from operator site guides and from Annexure IV of the Directorate guidelines, which defines where diving is legally permitted. Havelock carries the volume; the quieter reefs off Neil Island run deeper and see fewer boats.

Beginner and introductory dives, maximum 12 metres

Intermediate, certified divers

Advanced

Restricted and seasonal access, worth knowing before you plan around a site

• Jolly Buoy and Red Skin rotate. Jolly Buoy opens roughly November to April, Red Skin roughly May to October. Only one is open at a time.
• Diving inside Mahatma Gandhi Marine National Park needs prior permission from the Chief Wildlife Warden and a fee of ₹500 per person per day for Indian citizens, ₹1,000 for foreign nationals.
• Barren and Narcondam permit diving but no landing ashore.
• Radhanagar Beach and Havelock Jetty are excluded from the permitted diving areas, so nobody can legally sell you a dive there.
• Cinque, Inglis, North Brother and South Brother sit inside sanctuaries and need the same forest clearance.

Who can dive in the Andamans

On fitness to dive, the process is the thing to understand. Every diver completes the standard medical questionnaire before entering the water. If you answer NO to every question you self-certify on the form and dive. If you answer YES to anything, you need a physician’s approval of fitness to dive first. That is the rule in the Directorate guidelines and in the WRSTC agency standards both. It is not decided by your age, and a birthday is not a disqualification. If you have a heart, lung, ear, sinus, neurological or pregnancy-related condition, or you are on medication, that is a conversation with a doctor and not something to settle by reading a website. If a doctor advises against diving, a sea walk in the Andamans keeps your head in a helmet at surface pressure and is a different proposition entirely.

Cost of scuba diving in Andaman

Indicative ranges as of September 2026, per person, before 18% GST. The guidelines require every centre to display its own rate card on the premises.

What moves the price: whether a boat is involved and how far it travels, how long you are actually underwater, whether photos are included or billed afterwards, and the instructor to diver ratio. That last one is worth asking about, because it is the easiest thing to leave out of a cheap quote.

Diving is almost always paid separately and is not built into a standard Andaman tour package. Most Havelock tour packages cover transfers, hotels and sightseeing only. Treat diving as an add-on and budget for it on top, because a package that quietly includes a dive is usually including the cheapest shore dive available.

Rules that govern diving in the Andamans

These come from the Guidelines for Scuba Diving Centres in Andaman Nicobar Islands, notified by the Directorate of Tourism in August 2025. Where they are stricter than agency standards, the guidelines apply.

Depth limits. Introductory dives are capped at 12 metres. Entry-level certified divers may not exceed 18 metres unless they are trained or in training for deep diving. Advanced certified divers dive to their agency limit.

Decompression diving is banned outright. Only no-stage decompression diving is permitted anywhere in the islands, including on liveaboards, with no exception for instructors or students.

The 24-hour no-fly rule. This is the one that catches people out. The guidelines prohibit any dive within 24 hours of boarding a pressurised aircraft. DAN and the certification agencies set a lower floor, a minimum surface interval of 12 hours after a single no-decompression dive and 18 hours after repetitive or multi-day diving, but in the Andamans the 24-hour figure is the operative rule. In practice: if your flight leaves Port Blair at 10 am on Sunday, your last dive should finish before 10 am on Saturday. Build that buffer in when you book the flight, not after.

Safety stop. Three minutes at 5 metres after every dive except short shallow ones, and recommended on anything deeper than 9 metres. You should still have at least 50 bar in the tank when you start it.

Solo diving is not permitted under any circumstances.

Permitted areas only. Diving is legal only in the 18 zones listed in Annexure IV. Anything outside them, including Radhanagar Beach and the Port Blair harbour channel, is prohibited.

Marine life. Collecting coral, shells or marine flora and fauna carries penal action under Section 29 of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. Boats may not anchor on dive sites.

How to check that an operator is legitimate

You cannot control the sea, but you can control who you dive with. Five checks, all required by the guidelines:

1. Registration. The dive centre must hold a current Certificate of Registration from the Directorate of Tourism, renewed annually. Ask to see it.
2. Instructor certification. At least one staff instructor must be certified by PADI, SSI, NAUI, CMAS, BSAC or another WRSTC member agency, and hold current emergency response certification. Certification numbers can be verified on the agency’s own website.
3. Oxygen and an emergency action plan. Every centre must carry pure oxygen and a written Emergency Action Plan signed off by PADI, SSI or the National Institute of Water Sports. Every dive boat must carry a medical oxygen set, flares, first aid kit, life jackets and a dive flag.
4. Insurance. Third-party cover of at least ₹10 lakh per person, plus a professional dive policy for the instructors.
5. Displayed rate card and receipts. The guidelines require the full list of services and rates to be displayed on the premises and a proper receipt to be issued. A centre quoting verbally and refusing a receipt is not following the rules.

A pre-dive briefing covering depth limits, site characteristics, current, entry and exit technique and hazards is mandatory before every dive. If nobody briefs you, that is your signal to walk away.

Diving here is well run and the conditions are forgiving, which comes from certified instructors, registered operators, shallow beginner sites and a calm season. It holds only while those things hold. Nobody can promise you a safe dive, and an operator who does is telling you something about their standards.

Planning your Andaman trip with andamantourism.org

andamantourism.org is based in the islands, with a head office in Sri Vijaya Puram and working relationships with the hotels, ferry operators and activity providers you will be using. That matters for diving in a specific way. Ferry timings between Port Blair, Havelock and Neil shift with the season and the sea. Dive slots run early in the morning and fill up. The 24-hour no-fly window has to be designed into the itinerary rather than patched on afterwards. Tell us the day you fly out first, and we will build the diving backwards from it.