The US will issue visas to one million Indians this year. The development comes almost a month after opening up visa slots for Indian citizens over the weekends, The Indian Express reported.
“The US Mission has already processed more than two lakh applications at our Embassy and Consulates in India and we’re on track to hit our goal of processing more than one million non-immigrant visa applications in 2023,” a spokesperson from the US Embassy in New Delhi told the publication. “Our goal is to process one million visa applications, which include non-immigrant visas of all categories."
He added that the one million visa plan is an India-specific effort to strengthen ties between the two countries.
Last month, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Visa Services, Julie Stufft, had said that there’s always been a huge demand for all categories of US visas in India. The pandemic-related shutdown led to a huge backlog of applications piling up which they’re now struggling to clear, while grappling with the post-pandemic surge in demand.
"It was a pretty rough couple of years in India. We have had a huge demand historically, even without a pandemic, across many visa categories. So not only visitors but immigrants and students and workers, tech workers in particular. We’re processing all that now. So at this point, we’ve put India in a different category from some of the others," Stufft told travel news platform Skift.
Until February, Indian travellers have to wait 700 days for an interview at the Mumbai consulate, according to the US State Department website. While lower than 999 days in January this year, it is much higher than the pre-Covid era, when the wait time was all of 60 days.
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