Taking steps to facilitate issuance of business visas in India: US

The US on Tuesday said there has been significant progress in issuance of business visas in India, and America is taking several steps like increasing the number of staff to further facilitate the process here.

Arun Venkataraman, US Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Global Markets, also said that incredible progress has been made for issuance of visas for students here. At the business side, "we have also made significant progress by issuing more H1B and L visas in 2022 than we did even in 2019 before the pandemic, that is a significant improvement. Even we are still in the process of ramping up our staff. We are doubling the number of direct hires, we have to facilitate the issuance of visas here at the embassy and we are also working to bring on diplomatic spouses to also work in the process in the areas of visas. "So we are continuing to take steps. We have already made progress and are issuing more visas than we ever did before," Venkataraman told.

He added that the serious challenges were there with regard to issuance of visas which was driven primarily by the pandemic. "As you can imagine, during the pandemic, we had to significantly reduce our operations and we are unable to issue visas in that context. I am pleased to say that we have really rebounded from that situation, we have taken a number of concrete steps to facilitate the issuance of visas," he said. Recently in Washington, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal stated that India discussed with the US the inordinate delays in issuance of business visas to the people from India.