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Indians Can Now Get US Visa Appointments At American Embassies Abroad As Per New Rules
- The facility will be available for Indians seeking travel and business visas but not eligible for interview waiver, such as first-time applicants and people whose visas have expired more than four years ago.
Flags of the United States and India (Representative Image) (Manpreet Romana/AFP via Getty Images)
Indians can now get visas to the United States by approaching US embassies in other countries like Thailand, the US embassy in New Delhi announced on Friday (3 February).
The US Embassy, India tweeted “Do you have upcoming international travel? If so, you may be able to get a visa appointment at the U.S. Embassy or Consulate in your destination. For example, @USEmbassyBKK has opened B1/B2 appointment capacity for Indians who will be in Thailand in the coming months.”
The facility will be available for Indians seeking travel and business visas but not eligible for interview waiver, such as first-time applicants and people whose visas have expired more than four years ago.
The embassy also informed in another tweet that it processed over 1 lakh visa applications in January itself and continues to increase its capacity further. It also said that such facilities will be opened at other locations in the future too.
The move has nonetheless left netizens wondering how it is supposed to reduce the trouble caused to visa prospects, who will now have to travel to another country to get their visa applications approved.
The backlog in approval of visa applications has become a contentious issue in the last two years, with delays of over 500 days in most parts of the country.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had taken up the issue of backlog with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in September last year.
The US government has taken several steps to reduce delays, including scheduling exclusive interviews for first-time applicants and boosting the staff at consular offices.
The US State Department has begun processing interview waiver cases remotely for applicants who have held US visas previously.
The backlog time is likely to fall only by mid-2023 and is expected to reach a record 1.2 million a year, making applications from India the second highest after China, as per PTI.
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