E-Paper
India on priority: US' plans for Indian visa applicants
US Visa: India is America’s top priority for issuance of visas, a senior official of the US embassy said.
The wait times for US visas are expected to move towards normalcy by the middle of 2023, a senior US embassy official said on Thursday adding that some progress has already been made through changes in rules and the opening of 100,000 slots for H and L work visa.
The priority will be to reduce the wait time for non-immigrant work visas such as the H and L categories, the official said adding that around 82,000 student visas for India have been issued this year.
The US will initially focus “aggressively” on applicants in these categories using the “drop box” facility, or those who already were issued a US visa and are exempted from interviews, before taking up the case of first-time applicants. The effort, the official said, will be on reducing the wait times as much as possible and moving towards greater normalcy by June-July 2023.
Read more: Wait times for US visas expected to move towards normalcy by mid-2023
“Opening the 100,000 additional slots for H and L visas cut the wait time, which was more than a year earlier, to about half. The wait time for those using the drop box for B-1 and B-2 visas continues to be several months. We will see progress over the next nine months,” the official said.
“India is the number one priority for Washington now...There are lots of applicants in all categories only in India, and that’s why it’s a priority,” the official added, acknowledging that experts were unprepared for the rate at which the demand for visas had come in following the easing of the Covid pandemic.
