Indian-Americans Find Visa, Passport Services A Nightmare

Wednesday, 14 January 2015, 23:00 IST
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WASHINGTON: A mid-level Pentagon official applied for a tourist visa at the Indian Embassy here a few years ago to visit some of the famous destinations in India, but had no idea the visa process would turn out to be a year- long nightmare for him."It was a frustrating and agonising wait, Peter Brooks (name changed) said.

After dozens of phone calls and several visits to the Visa and Counselor services office of the Indian Embassy, he was told that his passport was lost."There was not even a sorry from the official," he told PTI, adding it was one year later that he was asked by the Embassy to come and collect his passport and, that too, without a visa.

In between, the official travelled to India with the U.S. defence secretary on his diplomatic passport. "I never have had such a frustrating experience as with the Indian Embassy," the official said. In private conversation, Indian Embassy officials concede that the visa and passport services are in a mess. In the last five years, the visa and passport services have been outsourced to three different companies, but the Indian-Americans face problems in getting their work done.

Harshad Jain, from the Greater Washington area claimed he recently had to courier his documents five times to the new outsourcing company.

"Every time, I would send the document, I would receive another letter from the Embassy to send some other additional documents. If some documents are missing, why did not they ask for it in one letter," he told Embassy officials over the weekend.

"This is unacceptable. If this has happened, I am very sorry for that," Arun Kumar Sinha Minister Consular at the Indian Embassy told community members during an interaction over the weekend, where he was flooded with complaints.

Complaints ranged from no one picking up phones either at the embassy or the outsourcing company, or people having to wait for a long time to get their issues resolved or even the behaviour of the people at the visa/passport windows.

"There is an urgent need to improve the telephone services. People attending it are not well informed and many a times they give incorrect information," said Renuka Mishra, a scientist at the National Institute of Health. "Community members have a hard time in reaching out to Cox and King” said Ashok Batra. "Every time, we speak to people at the Embassy or the outsourcing company, they give us contradictory statements. It is very confusing," said Ram Singh.

Conceding that there were teething problems in consular services, Sinha said the Embassy has started taking steps to improve them. For instance, the Embassy has started imposing hefty penalty on the outsourcing company for not meeting the deadline or not adhering to the standards set by the Indian government. The Indian Embassy is launching a dedicated phone line from this week to address the complaints related to visa and passport services, Sinha said.

The website related to visa and passport services is being renewed and this would now be more user-friendly, Sinha said in a rare interaction between the Indian-American community and the Indian Embassy officials here, which was organised by the National Council of Asian Indian Associations.

"This is an initiative of the Indian Embassy to start an ongoing dialogue with the community on any Consular, Visa and OCI (Overseas Citizenship of India) questions and concerns that the community may have," said Gisela Ghani, NCAIA president. "This is a continuing dialogue and the first one this year to start the engagement with the Embassy," she added.

Community leaders say they have been facing similar problems at all the diplomatic missions in the U.S. - New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta and San Francisco. Indian Embassy and Consulates in the United States issue over 3,40,000 visas and 80,000 passports annually. In his interaction, Sinha conceded that they had "a lot of teething trouble" on issues related to passport and visa services.

"But going by the number of complaints we receive, which is a declining trend, indicates that the services have improved in the past several months," he said. Sinha said visa application of Indian-origin people is now rarely declined. "Since October 2014 till date, less than 10 visa applications have been rejected," he said.

For the last one month, he said, the passport services were majorly hit as the passport printing machine was experiencing technical problems. The supplier was based in Germany where the Christmas vacation is month-long. Hence, the replacement parts of the machine have arrived only this week. "Routine passport services would resume now and backlog would be over soon," he said.

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Source: PTI